摘要 |
The present inventor devised, among other things, an information retrieval system that determines whether a query is ambiguous or not and based on this determination either continues or aborts a search process. One query evaluation extracts word pairs from an input query and uses features of the extracted word pairs, for example the number of word pairs and their frequencies within a document collection, to determine if the query is ambiguous or not. Another evaluation measures topical convergence, using query related caselaw headnotes that are associated with topics in a legal taxonomy. And yet another checks topical convergence through the lens of full caselaw documents and secondary legal documents, such as law review articles, specifically the minimum number of case law and secondary legal documents that are necessary to span a set of top ranked topics identified using the query. |