Legal search: foundations, evolution and next challenges. The Wolters Kluwer experience

Resumo

In this paper, we explain how legal search is different from other search scenarios and why it should be considered as an area plenty of technical and cognitive challenges. We introduce our experience in this field, based on an extensive analysis of legal users search behavior, identification of patterns, and new search functionalities developed in a multinational environment. The state-of-the art in this area is now based on Natural Language Processing techniques, semantic expansion, advanced queries and documents suggestions, advanced cluster extraction, relevance score ranking and displaying of best results. Furthermore, there are still new challenges to be faced in legal search. New solutions will be based in better integration of the algorithms with the content structures, better understanding of users, specific work environment and iterative prototypes.