Identification of Case Content with Quantitative Network Analysis: An Example from the ECtHR

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What is a case decided by the European Court of Human Rights about? The Courts own case database, HUDOC, lists all the articles mentioned in a specific case in their metadata. They also supply a number of keywords, but these keywords for the most part are reduced to repeating phrases from the relevant articles. In order to enhance information retrieval about case content, without relying on manual labor and subjective judgment, we propose in this paper a quantitative method that gives a better indication of case content in terms of which articles a given case is more closely associated with. To do so, we rely on the network structure induced by existing case-to-case and case-to-article citations and propose two computational approaches (referred to as MAININ and MAINOUT) which result in assigning one representative article to each case. We validate the approach by selecting a sample of important cases and comparing manual investigation of real content of those cases with the MAININ and MAINOUT articles. Results show that MAININ in particular is able to infer correctly the real content in most of the cases.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLegal Knowledge and Information Systems
EditorsFloris Bex, Serena Villata
Number of pages10
Place of PublicationAmsterdam
PublisherIOS Press
Publication date2016
Pages53-62
ISBN (Print)978-1-61499-725-2
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-61499-726-9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016
EventJURIX: Law, Artificial Intelligence and Information Systems - Inria Sophia Antipolis Mediterranean, Valbonne, France
Duration: 14 Dec 201616 Dec 2016
Conference number: XXIX
http://jurix2016.unice.fr/

Conference

ConferenceJURIX
NummerXXIX
LocationInria Sophia Antipolis Mediterranean
LandFrance
ByValbonne
Periode14/12/201616/12/2016
Internetadresse

ID: 170337685