Detecting change in legal concepts

Abstract

In this paper we discuss a general approach to detecting conceptual change developed in our on-going work on concept drift [Rissland et al., 1994]. We illustrate our approach on an actual, still evolving, legal example, the 'good faith' concept in the law of personal bankruptcy. In our approach, we detect that a concept is changing by measuring changes in a structural representation of it, such as a decision tree.