Web Service based Intelligent Search on Legal Documents

Abstract

Web services such as RESTful APIs provide high flexibility for knowledge base systems in different domains. To apply it to the legal aspect, we can obtain much data of the case law efficiently enabling us to relate one case to another easily and even to compare the details of a plenty of the case laws simultaneously. Having said that, to ensure the performance of the web services and the accuracy of the data sourcing from them is onerous in the consideration of the backend system for the web services and relevant search engine. In this paper, we introduce a web service for the legal knowledge, LegalKB, enhancing a concept search, and implement a method, WMD ranking method, to speed up the data search through the enhanced system queries. On top of this, we propose a method to automate the optimisation of the system parameters to ensure that the system queries run in the most optimal manner - integration of multiple machine learning methods into our web service to facilitate third-party applications to interface with our web service enlarging the knowledge base to a great extent.