Using statutes-based ir drive legal cbr

A hybrid information retrieval (IR) system to drive case-based reasoning (CBR) in legal domains is presented. The paper points out the assumptions made and processes involved in a typical mental conceptualization an intuitive model of how human beings represent, recognize and retrieve concepts. The world of general discourse is simplified into a narrow domain, limiting the set of concepts, terms, and structures. The limitation allows the application of stereotypical scenarios. Legislators' professional work creates, based on the logic of law, a natural basis for an indexing and retrieving structure which can be used as a front-end processor for a legal CBR system. The practical application of the combined IR-CBR system is demonstrated by experiments in Bankruptcy Case Law. The natural language description of a novel situation (case text) is the input, which is automatically classified for the production of similar cases' lists.