Exploratory Data Analysis as a Means of Structuring Legal Knowledge about Concepts and Documents

The information crisis in law demands proper instruments of information filtering. Traditional information retrieval systems do not satisfy these demands because they present only the syntactic form of documents. Exploratory data analysis is a good tool for the representation of legal knowledge within the syntactic structure of the documents. It could also solve the bottleneck of the time-consuming knowledge acquisition for the creation of conceptual information retrieval systems. In our prototype CONCAT we represent legal knowledge and document structure by a knowledge base which is structured by statistical and connectionist methods.