Document Similarity of Czech Supreme Court Decisions

Abstract

Retrieval of court decisions dealing with a similar legal matter is a prevalent task performed by lawyers as it is a part of a relevant decision-making practice review. In spite of the natural language processing methods that are currently available, this legal research is still mostly done through Boolean searches or by contextual retrieval. In this study, it is experimentally verified whether the doc2vec method together with cosine similarity, can automatically retrieve the Czech Supreme Court decisions dealing with a similar legal issue as a given decision. Furthermore, the limits and challenges of these methods and its application on the Czech Supreme Court decisions are discussed.