Being a hype word, AI has many definitions & expectations. The following description is refreshing in the midst of a hype! So what is artificial intelligence? The truth is, it’s not a science in the common sense of the word. Rather, it’s an aspirational concept that doesn’t quite fit today’s realities. Modern artificial intelligence is …
After teaching legal information retrieval to first year law students for a few weeks, I started thinking about how we actually search for legal sources. Barbara Bintliff’s thoughts were very interesting in this regard: Legal research no longer requires beginning with knowledge of the law because the emphasis of electronic research is on facts and …
It seems context is not only a buzzword within information retrieval: One of the hottest concepts in mobile right now is the idea of context. The thought process goes something like this: because the modern smartphone comes equipped with all kinds of sensors, is always on, and tends to be touched by its owner quite …
Though there are different theories on why people search for information – suggesting uncertainty, satisfying a goal or simple curiosity – a gap in knowledge seems rather convincing in a legal setting. Assuming that lawyers generally search for legal sources in order to deal with a working task, the following statement is very persuasive: Some …
Quote of the month: Legal information retrieval vs jigsaw puzzles Read More »
Information overload is apparently not a new phenomena but was already noticed by Morris L Cohen, co-author of How to Find the Law (pdf), in 1968: […] the materials of our law seem to be marked by an accelerating birth rate, an almost non-existent mortality rate, and a serious resistance to contraception on the part …
Continuing on the subject of context ….. […] the major different cognitive structures of individual users […] may be represented to intermediary mechanisms and IR systems, e.g. the actual work task or interest leading to a current cognitive state which may end up in a problem or uncertainty state for the actual user. These mental …
Reading a lot of material on the user perspective of information retrieval, I came across the following quote: […] despite experience with using general-purpose search engines, users may never discover strategies such as those known by the expert reference librarians. The knowledge to use such strategies needs to be explicitly taught. Furthermore, the decomposition and …
Quote of the month: users and procedural knowledge Read More »
This post was originally written in preparation for a conference by the Trust for Legal Information (Stiftelsen för rättsinformation) on ‘Law as a Service’. Being inspired by last year’s VQ Forum, and an blog post titled ‘I Am Now an App™ by Jason Wilson, I would like to share some ideas and thoughts. When we …
Visiting the Annual Nordic Conference in Legal Informatics in Rovaniemi, Finland, I started thinking about the progress that information retrieval technology has made the last 30 years, and remembered the following statement from 1985: The user’s task is simply to find the right combination of search terms to retrieve all and only the relevant documents. …
A growing amount of legal information is in itself not a bad thing. Though quantity is not to be confused with quality, more data increases the chances of finding information that is applicable to one’s question. The challenge is, however, how to access this information. Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a …
