The automatic generation of hypertext links in legal documents

Abstract

Huge legal information retrieval systems very often produce information overload for the user. This problem can be solved by automatically generated document summaries and structured meta-information. In addition, the user needs a flexible instrument for browsing and structuring of this output as well as for referring to the original documents. Hypertext is an appropriate tool for this purpose. The quantity of necessary hypertext links makes manual insertion impractical. KONTERM is a prototype for the semi-automatic analysis of documents and the automatic generation of hypertext links. Concepts are identified by terms and contextrelated probabilistic rules. The transformation of ASCII documents to HTML documents results in an remarkable improvement of the presentation. With the hypertext features, the prototype KONTERM constitutes a useful information assistant for the practitioner and the academic.