Patent Grant
7778954
One or more portions of this patent document contain material subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyrights whatsoever. The following notice applies to this document Copyright 2005, Thomson Legal and Regulatory, Inc.
Various embodiments of the invention concern systems, methods, and software for extracting and presenting relationships between textual documents, such as judicial opinions or case documents.
The explosion in the number of textual documents being generated has made it increasingly important to generate an electronic version of the documents to enable automated processing to extract data, to determine information about the textual documents, and to identify relationships with other textual documents in a database. This is especially true with very large databases which may contain hundreds of thousands of textual documents, such as a database containing legal cases and other legal material.
A legal database may contain a large number of legal cases. A legal case in this document refers to an individual written decision or judicial opinion issued in the course of a litigation. These decisions usually contain citations to and quotations from other documents, including other legal cases to establish past practice and justify the result (establish precedence) of the decision. Citations are written in distinctive styles which includes special abbreviations and punctuation which facilitate their identification. Also, quotations are usually set off in quotation mark. It is useful to identify these citations and quotations.
In some circumstances, the citations and quotations in a legal case may be identified by automatically parsing through the text of a legal case to identify candidates based upon punctuation and other characteristics. However, the punctuation which sets off a quotation may be used for other purposes, and the abbreviations and formats which characterize a citation are not necessarily unique. To ensure accurate identification, a citation or quotation must be verified. A citation has a predefined format. For example, a written decision of a California Court of Appeals case in 1993 in a lawsuit between Ms. Pleasant and Mr. Celli may have a citation such as, Pleasant v. Celli, 18 Cal. App. 4th 841, 22 Cal. Rptr. 2d 663 (1993). The first portion of the citation indicates the two parties last names and their positions in the case. For example, Ms. Pleasant is the first name listed. Since this is an appellate case, she is the appellant and Mr. Celli is the appellee. The next portion of the citation (i.e., 18 Cal. App. 4th 841 for example) indicates where a copy of the written decision may be located. The first number indicates the volume number of the case reporter in which the decision is located and the text portion (i.e., Cal. App 4th) indicates the name of the reporter and the edition of the reporter. The number following the reporter name indicates the starting page number of the decision. Thus, both the text of the citations and quotations in a written reported decision textual document have well defined format which may be automatically identified.
Once the citations and quotations in a legal case are identified and any relationships between these citations and quotations and any prior legal cases are determined, this information may be used for a variety of purposes. For example, this information may be used for both legal case verification purposes and legal case collocation purposes. Verification is a process whose end result is a determination that the legal case currently being reviewed is still good law (i.e., it has not been overruled or limited by some later case due to different reasoning). A case that is not good law may not be persuasive since the reasoning of the case is no longer valid. Thus, the process of verification ensures that the case being used to support an argument is still good law and the reasoning of that case is still valid. Collocation, on the other hand, is a process whose end result may be a list of other legal cases, legal materials or textual documents which cover similar issues to the case currently being reviewed, or a list of cases covering a particular subject matter, such as intellectual property. For example, a user of the legal database may have located a case which is of interest to him and he would then like to identify other cases that are related to the case of interest based on the subject matter. Thus, it is desirable for a user of a legal database to be able to perform both verification and collocation using a single integrated system.
Prior to electronic databases, legal cases were published in several different formats each of which have some advantages and disadvantages. A register publication gathers information at the source of the new law and presents the new law in roughly chronological order. An example of this type of publication is a reporter volume that contains the new legal cases for a particular court in chronological order. These register publications may be rapidly published and provide a good statement of the new law, but these register publications cannot provide collocation (i.e., it cannot provide a researcher with information about other cases which may be related to the subject matter of the instant case). It is also difficult to verify a legal case with a register publication. Another type of legal publication is a code publication which attempts to gather together the law that applies to a particular subject matter so that a researcher may determine the current state of the law from a single source. A code publication may permit a case to be verified since outdated law is removed as a code publication is updated. An example of a code publication is an annotated statutory code publication which gathers information from statutes and legal cases about a particular subject matter. Legal case are not published in a code format. These code publications may provide a researcher with the ability to collocate legal cases and verify a legal case, but the information in these code publications, due to the amount of time required to compile these code publications, only describe the state of the law sometime in the recent past. Therefore, for rapidly changing areas of the law, a code publication may not be accurate and therefore cannot provide either the verification or collocation needs to the researcher.
Numerous efforts have been made to codify case law, but case law tends to resist codification for several reasons. First, there is a tremendously large number of legal cases so it is often very difficult and time consuming to attempt to classify the legal cases by subject matter. In addition, legal cases have a complex hierarchy of authority and control (i.e., whether a case from a particular court controls or influences the outcome of another court, which leads to differences between various courts within various regions of the United States. It is also very difficult to determine the effects that a newly-decided legal case may have on the current state of the law. The attempts to codify the case law have included treatises (which cover the current state of the law for a particular subject matter) or restatements of the law in particular subject areas.
In order to adequately perform legal research, legal researchers need to be able to determine the current state of the case law, and then access the case law in its register form. Any access to the case law itself or free-text access cannot easily provide a current state of the law. Thus, a researcher may use an index to the case law to find the case law. These indexes include a controlled vocabulary, manually created intellectual index to case law which requires extraordinary amounts of manpower to implement. Instead of these options, a citation index (also known as a case law citator) may be used.
There are several conventional case law citators. One citator provides both the required verification and collocation functions, but has several disadvantages. In particular this citator produces citation chains for a particular legal case which list how the legal case was treated by later legal case, such as indicating that the particular legal case was overruled or followed. This citator is not current since it typically waited for a legal case to be in the general case law prior to generating the case law citator information. This conventional system did an adequate job of verification, but did not really provide an adequate collocation function. In particular, it is tedious to locate other case law which relates to a particular case by following the citation strings, retrieving the reporter with a legal case, and then manually reviewing the legal case.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a system and method which seamlessly integrates general subject matter access to case law with citation information which provides a researcher with the desired verification function as well as the collocation function. Thus, the researcher may use a single integrated system which provides the researcher will all of the information that the researcher needs in a single location.
This description, which references and incorporate the identified figures and incorporates the appendix and appended claims, describes and illustrates one or more exemplary embodiments of the invention(s.) These embodiments, offered not to limit but only to exemplify and teach, are shown and described in sufficient detail to enable those skilled in the art to make and use the invention(s). Thus, where appropriate to avoid obscuring the invention(s), the description may omit certain information known to those of skill in the relevant art.
Some embodiments of the invention are particularly applicable to a computer-implemented legal text processing system and method for semi-automatically identifying characteristics, such as citations and quotations, within a legal document and identifying relationships between the legal document and other legal documents stored in-the database. The legal document may be a legal case, a statute, a law review article, an ALR article or a legal treatise. It is in the context of a legal case that the exemplary embodiments are described. It will be appreciated, however, that the system and method in accordance with the invention has greater utility and may be used for different legal documents, such as statutes, legislative histories, and administrative proceedings, and patents. Some embodiments apply the teachings herein to non legal documents, such as scientific literature.
Before describing the preferred embodiment of the invention, a brief description of the terminology that will be used to describe the invention will be provided. Any reported decision of a legal case is presumed to be an authoritative statement of the law when it is written. Then, later events may affect the authoritativeness of this legal case's decision. These later events may include later proceedings or written decisions during the same litigation (e.g., direct history), a decision of a later legal case from a different litigation which resolves the same issues in a different way or using different reasoning and overrules the earlier case, or a decision of a later legal case from a different litigation which resolves the same issue differently, but does not explicitly overrule the case. The direct history of a legal case may include a record of the connections between the legal cases that are part of the same litigation. The direct history may be of varying degrees of relevance and may include positive history (i.e., maintaining or supporting the authority (of the legal case) or negative history (for example, the legal case may no longer have the authority it once had)). The indirect history of a case is a record of the connections between legal case and other legal cases which are not part of the same litigation. The indirect history of a legal case may also be positive or negative. The significance of a particular case may often be indicated by the amount of discussion (i.e., the amount of text) that a later case uses in discussing a decision of another legal case while following, overruling or explaining the case. This is referred to as the depth of treatment of the case, as described below. One or more embodiments described herein may also be implemented on a system, such as that described in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/751,269, which was filed Dec. 30, 2003 and which is incorporated herein by reference.
Once the processing has been completed by the processes 42, the computer 32 outputs a data record 44 for the particular legal case which contains information about the history of the legal case, information about the depth of treatment of citations in the legal case, information about quotations within the legal case, and information about the subject matter text (i.e., headnotes) assigned to each citation in the legal case. The data record generated by the computer 32 for each legal case may be stored in a database 33 in a server 34. Then, when a user of one of the plurality of client computers 36 requests information about a legal case, the server 34 generates a user interface containing a variety information about the requested legal case based on the data records in the database 33, and presents the user reviewing the legal case with a variety of information about the legal case. An example of the user interface provided to the user of each client computer is described below with reference to
As the electronic data for the text of each written opinion for a new legal case is received by the computer 32, the legal case is processed as described above and the results of the processing is stored as a data record 44 in the database 33 of the in the server 34. The users of the client computers may then retrieve data about a particular legal case from the server 34. Thus, while the server 34 is providing data about a legal case to the one or more users of the client computers, the computer 32 may be simultaneously processing additional new legal cases and adding the information for that new legal case into the database 33 in the server 34. Now, an example of a preferred user interface and information provided to the user of a client computer will be described in more detail.
In the example shown in
The depth of treatment symbol 74, which may be, for example, one or more stars, where the number of stars indicate the degree to which the legal case's written opinion is treated, e.g., the amount of text in the cited case opinion which is devoted to the case of interest. The details of the depth of treatment assignment process will be described below in more detail. Now, a screen which permits a user to the limit the citations displayed in the display portion will be described with reference to
Briefly, the citation identification process identifies candidate citations by identifying certain patterns of text in the legal document and compares these patterns to a predetermined set of reference patterns. In particular, digits may be first identified in the text. Next, the text is scanned for abbreviations proximate to the digits which correspond to known reporter abbreviations, such as “Cal.” or “P.”. Once a piece of text having the particular formatting and punctuation of a candidate citation is identified, a case control database 124 is queried to determine if the identified candidate citation corresponds to a valid citation in the case control database. If the identified candidate citation matches a citation in the case control database, a second processing pass is performed. If no match is located, the identified candidate citation may be flagged for later manual review. As described above, each citation has a predetermined format. The format may be <case name>, <volume number> <abbreviation of reporter name> <series number (if more than one)> <page number in volume>. For example, in “18 Cal. App. 4th 841”. “Cal. App. 4th” refers to the “California Appellate” reporter, 4th series; “18” refers to volume 18; and “841” refers to page 841, the page of volume 18 of Cal. App. 4th where the case decision begins.
As example of a citation to a legal case is Pleasant v. Celli, 18 Cal. App. 4th 841, 22 Cal. Rptr 2d 663 (1993) in which the first name portion, i.e., Pleasant v. Celli, identifies the parties of the legal case; the second reporter portions, i.e., 18 Cal App. 4th 841 and 22 Cal. Rptr 2d 663, identify the reporters which themselves have a particular characteristic format as described above.
Once text corresponding to a reporter name is located, the text adjacent the reporter name is analyzed to identify the volume, series and page number of the citation as well as the year of the published opinion. Once this information is found, the candidate citation is identified and marked up, as described above, to identify it as a citation. The citation identification process may use a two pass process in which first, full format citations, such as Pleasant v. Celli, 18 Cal. App. 4th 841, 22 Cal. Rptr 2d 663 (1993), are identified, matched to the case control database, and placed within a table. In a second pass through the legal case, short form citations, such as Pleasant, may be identified based on the text of the full citations that are contained in the table. It should be noted that these short form citations cannot be identified automatically without first identifying each full citation. For doubtful short form citations which don t match the table, a tentative identification may be made.
The citation identification process 104 in
In general, the quote verification process 112 verifies that the candidate quotations identified by the quote identification process 108 are in fact from the source (i.e., the citing case) by comparing the candidate quotation in the cited case to the quotation in the citing case. The process then generates a data record 118 containing information about the verified quotation. The depth treatment process 114 uses information generated by the system, including the verified quotations to generate depth treatment information, such as the number of occurrences of a citation and the characteristics of the citation based on its position (e.g., whether it is free standing, at the head of a string or in the interior of a string). The process then generates a data record 120 containing information about the depth of treatment information that is applied to each citation in the case of interest. The negative treatment process 116 generates information about any negative treatment the case of interest has received by any of the citing cases and, in step 122, a database 124 containing information about each legal case being processed is updated manually to reflect the negative treatment. The data records 118, 120 from the quotation verification and depth treatment processes, respectively, may be combined together by a grouper process 126 along with a headnote assignment data record 128 (HNRESULT), as described below, to generate a single data record containing the depth treatment information, the quotation information, and the headnote assignment information, about the legal case being processed. This single data record may then be used to generate the information displayed on a computer screen to the user as shown in
The data record 118 containing the information about the verified quotations in the legal case also may be fed into a citation loci identification process 130 which attempts to identify the supporting text surrounding quotations and citations in the legal case to generate a citation loci data record 132. The citation loci data record may then be input into a subject matter assignment and thresholding process 134 which matches the words and phrases in the quotations to one or more headnotes or topics and then determines, based on a threshold value, which headnotes are selected, as described below with reference to
The quote identification process 108 uses the file containing the text of the legal case with marked up citations to identify and mark-up quotations as described above. The text the legal case contains unverified quotations while the file 144 containing the verified quotations is stored in the database 33. The output of the quote identification process is a plurality of data records in which each data record has an identified quotation and a possible source of the quotation. The output of the quote identification process may be combined with the file containing the text of the legal case and the marked up citations to produce a file with marked up citations and quotations 110 which is used as an input to the depth of treatment process 114, the negative treatment process 116, the loci identification process 130 and the subject matter assignment and thresholding process 134. During the quote identification process 108, as described below in more detail with reference to
The Qdata and Qtxt files 140, 142 are then fed into the quote verification process 112 which uses an electronic database of legal cases, already available, to find and verify the possible source of each quotation found by the quotation identification process. For each quotation, the possible source of the quotation is retrieved. Next, the quotation identified by the quotation identification process is matched against the text of the possible source to locate text in the source corresponding to the quotation. This verifies the source as the origin of the quotation. For each quotation with a verified source, a data record 144 containing the verified quotations for a legal case is stored in the database 33. Then, when a legal case containing verified quotations is displayed as a citation to a legal case, the citation will contain a quotation symbol, as described above, indicating that the legal case has a verified quotation. The depth treatment process will now be described.
The depth treatment process 114 may receive the file 110 containing the legal case text with the marked up citations and quotations and, in step 146, the depth treatment process performs several processes in order to determine the significance of the citation based on a set of predetermined criteria that are related in some ways to significance. These criteria may be the number of times that the citation appeared in the legal case, the type of the citation, and the association of a verified quotation with the citation. First, the depth treatment process reads through the file 110 and identifies citations which have been marked up previously by the citation identification process. For each identified citation, the type of the citation is determined to be either an ordinary citation, a middle of a string citation, or the head of a string citation. An ordinary citation is a typical citation which usually appears within a legal case and that does not have other citations adjacent to it. A middle of a string (interior) citation is a citation that appears in the middle or at the end of a string citation in which a series of legal documents are cited together in a sentence or paragraph. An interior citation is usually perceived by users as contributing less to the depth with which the cited case is discussed. The head of string citation is a citation that appears at the beginning of a string citation and is perceived by users as contributing more to the depth since it is conventional to place the most pertinent citation at the head of a string citation. The depth of treatment process may also identify the page number of the legal case for all available pagination on which the citation appears so that a depth record is written as many times as page breaks occur in the legal case.
The information about each citation in a legal case, such as the total number of times that the citation appears in the legal case document, the types of each of these citations, and the page number for each citation occurrence is output in a file 148 which is stored in the database 33. This information, in addition to any verified quotations associated with any of the occurrences of the citation, may be used to generate both the “citations to the case” section described above and the depth of treatment symbols. The technique for generating the depth of treatment symbols will be described in more detail below.
The negative treatment process 116 may include an automatic processing step 150 and a manual verification step 152 which generate a list of the negative history (i.e., other written opinions from other legal case which disagree with or overrule the current legal case) for the legal case. During the automatic processing step 150, the file containing the legal text with the marked up citations and quotations is scanned in order to identify stems of certain words, such as “overrule”, “recede”, “disapprove”, or “distinguish”, which may indicate negative treatment. As an illustration, the process to identify the root of the word “overrule” in the text of the legal case is described. When an instance of the root “overrule” is identified, a set of heuristic rules, as described below, are applied to make a determination about whether the sentence containing the identified root is actually an overruling, as described below with reference to
The loci identification process 130 uses the file containing the legal case text with marked up citations and quotations and a file 144 containing the verified quotations, identifies any marked up citations, and applies a set of heuristic rules, as described below, to identify and select a portion of text from around each citation which may indicate the text supported by the citation. If a citation appears multiple times in a legal case, the surrounding text for each of the occurrences of the citation is combined. In addition, if the quote verification process, as described above, has verified any quotation associated with that citation, the text of that verified quotation is also combined with the other text surrounding the citation. All of the identified text that surrounds each citation may then be used to determine one or more headnotes or subject matter headings which may be applicable to the citation. The subject matter heading classifies the citation based on a predetermined number of subject matter areas, such as Intellectual Property or Patents. A process 154 (Headqf) reads all of the text identified adjacent to a given citation and generates a natural language search query to search an existing database for matches to the identified text, as described below. The natural language query process is generally described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,265,065 and 5,418,948, which are assigned to the same assignee as the present application and are incorporated herein by reference. The Headqf process 154 generates a file 156 containing the natural language queries. Using the natural language queries, a subject matter assignment process step 158 runs the natural language queries against a headnotes database to identify subject matter headings, such as headnotes, which possibly match the text surrounding the citation. For each matched subject matter heading, the query also generates a belief score value indicating how close the subject matter heading match was to the text. A predetermined number of the most closely relevant subject matter headings and their belief scores are provided to a thresholding process step 160.
The thresholding step uses the subject matter headings identified and performs various calculations which take into account the rank of the subject matter headings, the belief score of the subject matter headings and the number of citations which reference that subject matter heading. After the calculations are performed, a predetermined number of top headnote hits and a flag for each headnote indicating if the headnote passed the thresholding are stored in the database 33 with a link to the citation. These subject matter headings permit citations in the legal case to be classified by and searched for using these subject matter headings, as described above with reference to
An example of a set of rules which may be used by the invention will now be described. The set may include a rule that identifies paragraphs which do not contain any quotations and stores them in the paragraph buffers where they are overwritten by the next paragraph, and a rule for paragraphs with possible quotations in which the lexical scanner returns a tag to the main loop indicating that the paragraph is either a normal text paragraph, an indented block quotation paragraph, or that the text of the quotation appears in a footnote. Once the type of the paragraph is determined, the lexical scanner processes the text within the paragraph in the same manner to identify any tokens in each paragraph.
Within each paragraph, the lexical scanner may identify the following tokens: a capitalized word, a non-capitalized word, a numeric character string, an abbreviation, a proper name (i.e., “Mr. Smith”), a case citation, a section reference (i.e., “Section 150”), a case name (i.e., Roe v. Wade), an embedded reference, any end of the sentence punctuation, any other punctuation characters, a colon, semicolon or comma followed by a space, single or multiple white space characters, a start of a quotation, an end of a quotation, the number of a footnote, open and close parentheses, open and close brackets, open and close curly braces, a mark-up for a citation, and a mark-up for an embedded reference. More details about the operation and modification of the FLEX software application is available from the Sun Microsystems Inc. Reference Manual, Programmer's Overview Utilities and Libraries, Chapter 9, pp, 203-226, which is incorporated herein by reference.
The paragraph buffers 172 are where the tokens about the paragraph most recently scanned by the lexical scanner are stored before being processed by the main loop 174 and then possibly written out into an output file if a quotation is identified in the paragraph. The main loop 174 may decide what action to take for each token returned by the lexical scanner, manage the paragraph buffers, and decide when to discard data for a previous paragraph from the paragraph buffer, link several physical paragraphs together into a virtual paragraph for quotations which run over several physical paragraphs, determine where the breaks between sentences occur within a paragraph, and decide when to process a virtual paragraph by a set of heuristic rules, as described below.
Once the rules have been applied to each token in a paragraph, the quotation identification process determines if another paragraph exists in step 184 and loop to step 180 to process a new paragraph. Once all of the paragraphs have been analyzed, in step 186, the process output the data record containing the identified quotations and the possible source of those quotations. Now, the quotation verification process will be described.
where Doc_Occurrences is the number of documents in which the given term is present and Collection_Docs is the total number of documents in the collection. The IDF is used for purposes of determining good terms for matching, since a rare word is more likely to be distinct and provide a good indication that the quotation is from the candidate source.
Once the IDF has been calculated for each term, a selected number of the terms (i.e., six) with the highest IDF values below a selected threshold may be ranked by IDF value (step 206) and placed into a “template” (i.e., storage array) (step 207) which indicates the position of each term in the text string. Any terms with an unusually high IDF value (e.g., greater than 0.80) are not used, since such infrequently occurring terms are often misspelled words. If there are several terms with the same IDF value, then the alphanumeric ordering of the terms may be used as a secondary key for ranking the terms for the template. Should there still exist equivalent terms (e.g., terms with the same IDF values and alphanumeric spellings) then the position of the terms in the text string may be used as a third key for ranking the terms in the template. The template may then be compared to the quotation from the candidate source document to determine if an exact match, based on the positions of the high IDF terms, occurs in step 208. If an exact match occurs, then in step 210, the verified quotation is output and fed into the database as described above. In the event that an exact match does not occur in step 212, a certification match failure message is generated and the quotation is not stored in the database.
In step 204, if the text string has multiple segments (i.e., it contains one or more separator terms in the text string, such as “The roof fell in . . . crashing down), the process goes to step 214 in which the IDF for each term within each required segment is determine. Then, a selected number of terms (e.g., four) within each segment, with the highest IDF values below the threshold, are ranked by IDF (step 215) and placed into a template (step 216) in order to determine the position of the terms in the segment for matching purposes (step 208). For a text string with more than four segments, the first two and last two segments may be used to match against the candidate source document (step 217-218). In this manner, the quotations identified by the automatic quote identification process are automatically verified and any verified quotations are identified by a quotation symbol, as described above. Now, the negative treatment process in accordance with the invention will be described.
An example of the set of the rules used will now be described, but the invention is not limited to any particular set of rules. For example, one rule may locate “overrule” or overrules” in a sentence and then scans backwards for up to four words. If “not” or never” is located, then the sentence is discarded since it does not refer to an actual overruling. If “we” is found, then the sentence is added to the list of possible overruling which are reviewed by a human being. If none of the phrases is located during the backwards scan, the sentence is also added to the list.
Another rule may locate “overrule” and then scans backwards for up to five words to attempt to locate non-case words which would indicate that something other than the legal case is being overruled so that the sentence is not added to the list. A few examples of these non-case words include “request”, “motion”, “objection”, “claim”, and “verdict”. If the rule locates “point” or “points”, then the sentence may be scanned forward to the end of the sentence and if “case”, “cases” or “supra” is located, then the status of the sentence is unknown and it is passed on to the human reviewer.
Another rule may locate “overrule” and scan backwards or forwards, and reject or accepts possible overrulings based on the other words within close proximity to the word “overrule” since these additional words will provide the context in which the word “overrule” is being used. For example, once “overrule” is located, four words before the word may be scanned and the following actions are taken when the following words are located: 1) if “we” is located, and the word prior to “we” is “that”, the “we” is ignored (discussion about overruling only), but if no word “that” is located, then the sentence is a possible overruling; 2) if the verb is modified by a word that indicates uncertainty, such as “rather”, “might”, etc . . . the sentence is rejected since the court may be only indicating it might overrule the case; 3) if any word indicates a discussion of an overruling, then the sentence is rejected; 4) if a word indicates that another person did the overruling, then the sentence is rejected; and 5) if “will” or “should” are located, the process looks back five words for a positive word in order to accept the sentence. There may also be a similar set of rules for the verb “overrules”, the infinitive form of the verb and the passive voice of the verb.
Another set of rules may look for various words which indicate a discussion of whether to overrule, whether a court has the authority to overrule or a past overruling since these sentences are rejected as not containing an actual overruling. Another set of rules may reject sentences which indicate that someone else is doing the overruling (i.e., another court in the past). Still another rules may look for “overruling” and then determine if the sentence is rejected or accepted based on the sentences surrounding the word, as described above.
There are also other rules which look for particular features of a sentence independent of the verb “overrule”. For example, if the phrase “COURT:” is located at the beginning of a sentence, which indicates a direct quotation from the judge, the sentence may be accepted. If the word “Congress” is located at the beginning of a sentence, which may indicate that a Congressional statute is being overruled or that Congress itself is overruling a case, the sentence may be rejected. If the word “circulated” is found in a sentence near the word “overrule”, the sentence may be accepted to catch unusual language, such as “because the decision overrules an opinion of this court, it was circulated to all active judges . . . ” which could not be automatically identified in some other manner. Another rule may look for “overrule” within a quoted string and reject the sentence since it is usually an overruling by another court of a case which is being quoted by the current court.
In addition to the word stem “overrule”, other synonyms may be searched for and identified. For example, the rules may also detect the word stem “abrogat” for California cases which use the term “abrogated” and the phrase “receded from” for Florida cases since these terms are used to indicate an overruling in each respective state. These verb tense rules may be applied in any order and the invention is not limited to any particular set of rules or any particular order of execution of the rules.
The output of the set of verb tense rules from the automatic negative treatment process is a list of possible overrulings. Then, a proximity rule is applied to each possible overruling to determine if the overruling applies to a particular legal case. For example, the proximity rule may eliminate a possible overruling if the sentence containing the stem does not contain a citation, if the previous or next sentence does not contain a citation or the sentence with the stem “overrul” does not contain a word or phrase used to refer to a case such as “case”, “opinion”, “holding”, “precedent”, their plurals or “progeny” or “v.”, “ex rel”, “ex parte” or “supra”. Any sentences which contains the stem “overrul” and satisfies the proximity rules are added to a suggested list 222 of overruling in the legal case. These suggested overrulings are then reviewed and checked during the manual review process step 152 by a human being. The human being, during the manual review process, also determines the case which is overruled and that data is entered into the case control database 124 which tracks legal cases within the legal cases database.
In accordance with another aspect of this negative treatment process, the automatic process may also identify relationships other than overruled, such as “disting” for “distinguished” or “apposite” in a legal case, by extending the method to the language that characterizes those other relationships. In summary, the negative treatment process aids the human reviewer in determining possible overruling in the legal cases by automatically determining possible locations of overruling so that the amount of text that has to be actually reviewed by the human being is significantly reduced. Thus, the negative treatment process increases the speed with which overruling in a legal case may be identified and added into the negative history of the legal case. Now, the depth treatment process will be described in more detail.
At step 230, the file with the text of the legal case and the marked up citations and quotations, as described above, is received by the depth treatment process. At step 232, the depth treatment process identifies a citation in the legal case, and then in step 234, the type of citation is determined. Each citation in the legal case may be 1) a citation at the head of a string citation; 2) a citation without other accompanying citations; 3) a citation within the interior of a string citation; or 4) a pro forma history citation (i.e., a citation that, in the context of the document, are cited solely as a ancillary historical references for one of the cases cited in its own right). Each of these types of citations has a different amount of significance. For example, a lone citation or a citation at the head of a string citation tends to be more significant than a citation in the middle of the string.
The depth treatment process next determines if there are any additional citations in the legal case in step 236 and loops back to step 232 to process the next citation in the legal case. Once all of the citations in the legal case have been identified and sorted into one of the types described above, they are fed into the grouper process 126 as shown in
One example of a technique for assigning a depth symbol to a particular citation will now be described, but the invention is not limited to any particular technique for assigning the depth symbols. In addition, the invention is not limited to any particular type of depth symbol. In this example, a citation in the legal case with one to three occurrences of any type of citation (i.e., the citation standing along, the citation is the head of the string citation or the citation is in the middle of a string citation) in the legal case is assigned two stars (e.g., **), a citation in the legal case with four to eight occurrences of any type of citation is assigned three stars (e.g., ***), and a citation with nine or more occurrences of any type of citation is assigned four stars (e.g., ****). To further refine these assignments, a citation with three occurrences of any type of citation and a verified quotation associated with the citation is assigned three stars(e.g., ***) while if a citation has only internal string citation types, one star is deducted from that citation. Thus, the depth symbol for a particular citation in the legal case is automatically assigned by the system in accordance with the invention. The depth symbols help a user of the system more quickly determine which citations are probably more relevant. Now, the subject matter text assignment process in accordance with the invention will be described.
To identify the citation locus, several text-parsing rules may be used, some of which are stronger than others, but which collectively would be highly likely to identify the text. To allow for varying effectiveness of the different rules, the extracted text may be divided into three groups, “high”, “medium” and “low”, according to the likelihood that the extracted text was part of the correct citation locus. These rules may include:
Then, in step 254, the terms in the citation loci are weighted according to the rule that was used to identify them, with a high, medium or low matching corresponding to weights of 2.0, 1.0 and 0.5, respectively. Different types of documents, such as legal cases or law review articles, may require a different set of rules to determine the weights. Once the pieces of text have been identified and assigned a belief value, in step 256, the identified pieces of text are matched against pieces of text which may be within the cited document. In one example, the pieces of text within the cited document may be headnotes, but the invention is not limited to any particular type of text which the identified pieces of text are matched against. The matching may be done using natural language query as described in previously referenced U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,265,065 and 5,418,948 which are owned by the assignee of this application and are incorporated herein by reference. The results of the search is a list of possible pieces of text from the cited case, such as a headnote, which may be assigned to the citation in the legal case and a belief score for each possible piece of text.
Next, in step 258, the one or more pieces of text that are going to be assigned to the citation are selected though a thresholding process. The thresholding process ranks the pieces of text for each citation based on the belief score. The piece of text may be posted to the database whenever the following quantity equals or exceeds 0.5:
The beta values for this equation are as follows:
where the columns marked “ALR” contain variables for ALR articles, as described above, which have a higher belief score than the non-ALR documents. The columns labeled “non-ALR” contain variables for non-ALR documents.
In the equation, Freq is the total citation frequency for the citation pair, and lag2 is the belief score of the second following candidate when the candidates are sorted by belief score in descending order (or 0.4 if there is no such candidate). Once the thresholding has been completed and the one or more pieces of text has been assigned to each citation in the legal case, one or more pieces of text are stored in the database in step 260 as described above so that it may be retrieved for a user when requested.
In summary, the subject matter assignment process automatically generates one or more pieces of text for a citation in the legal case based on pieces of text in the cited case such as a headnote. The process first automatically identifies supporting text in the legal case and assigns a belief value to the supporting text, matches all of the piece of text against pieces of text in the cited cases, and then automatically assigns a piece of text, such as a headnote, from the cited case to the particular citation. These subject matter assignments permit a citation to the legal case to be sorted or selected by the subject matters which helps during the collocation process.
Thus, the machine implemented system in accordance with the invention automatically processes a document, such as a legal case, and generates information about the document which may provide the user of the system with useful information about the contents of the document. In a conventional system, on the other hand most of this information about the document would be generated by a human being reading the document and making notes about the document which is a slow, expensive, error-prone process. For a legal case, the system may automatically generate information about the negative history the legal case, about the depth treatment of a citation by the legal case, about the quotation in the legal case which are verified as originating from a particular source, and about one or more headnote which are assigned to a particular citation in the legal case. Thus, the operator of the system may rapidly generate this information about the legal case and a user of the system may quickly locate this information since it is all readily accessible from a graphical user interface.
Summary of Rules
While the foregoing has been with reference to a particular embodiment of the invention, it will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that changes in this embodiment may be made without departing from the principles and spirit of the invention, the scope of which is defined by the appended claims.
The present application is a Continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/182,028, filed Jul. 13, 2005, and now abandoned, which is a Continuation-In-Part of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/746,557, filed Dec. 22, 2000, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,529,756 which is itself a Continuation of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/120,170, filed Jul. 21, 1998 which is now abandoned. Each of these applications is incorporated herein by reference.
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