Introducing LUIMA: an experiment in legal conceptual retrieval of vaccine injury decisions using a UIMA type system and tools

This paper presents first results from a proof of feasibility experiment in conceptual legal document retrieval in a particular domain (involving vaccine injury compensation). The conceptual markup of documents is done automatically using LUIMA, a law-specific semantic extraction toolbox based on the UIMA framework. The system consists of modules for automatic sub-sentence level annotation, machine learning based sentence annotation, basic retrieval using Apache Lucene and a machine learning based reranking of retrieved documents. In a leave-one-out experiment on a limited corpus, the resulting rankings scored higher for most tested queries than baseline rankings created using a commercial full-text legal information system.