An ontology-based approach for Chinese legal information retrieval

Abstract

The keyword-based searches perform unsatisfactorily because of their poor semantic identification, isolated output information and non-uniformed output format, which lead to hard manual screening. In order to overcome these drawbacks, under the challenges that the ambiguity of legal language, the deficiency of three-stage inference for court decisions and the limited role of cases in China, a circular ontology between normative documents and judicial cases is proposed in order to contribute open-textured legal concepts and improve the retrieval accuracy. Taking spiritual compensation in medical disputes as an example, we discuss the correlativeness of normative documents and the similarity of judicial precedents, and the paper offers a practical framework of ontology-based legal information retrieval.