Semantic enhancement for legal information retrieval

Abstract

The Iuriservice application offers a semantically enabled FAQ search system and case law browser for the Spanish judges in their first appointment. The system is now at the first stage of implementation in the Spanish Judicial School. Users may input questions to the system in natural language to obtain access to a database of experience-based answers to practical day-to-day questions. In order to offer the question-answer pair from the application database that best matches the input question, the search system is enhanced using ontologies and semantic distance calculation. This paper will focus on the description of these technologies, bringing user needs and ontologies to the spotlight, and will show current effectiveness and efficiency results regarding the performance of the FAQ search engine. These results illustrate the enhancement that may be provided by semantic technologies for information retrieval in comparison with other techniques.