Importance

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Abstract

A computer-automated system and method identify text in a first “citing” court case, near a “citing instance” (in which a second “cited” court case is cited), that indicates the reason(s) for citing (RFC). The automated method of designating text, taken from a set of citing documents, as reasons for citing (RFC) that are associated with respective citing instances of a cited document, has steps including: obtaining contexts of the citing instances in the respective citing documents (each context including text that includes the citing instance and text that is near the citing instance), analyzing the content of the contexts, and selecting (from the citing instances' context) text that constitutes the RFC, based on the analyzed content of the contexts. A related computer-automated system and method selects content words that are highly related to the reasons a particular document is cited, and gives them weights that indicate their relative relevance. Another related computer-automated system and method forms lists of morphological forms of words. Still another related computer-automated system and method scores sentences to show their relevance to the reasons a document is cited. Also, another related computer-automated system and method generates lists of content words. In a preferred embodiment, the systems and methods are applied to legal (especially case law) documents and legal (especially case law) citations.

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First Claim