Find Relevant Cases in All Cases: Your Journey at Doctrine

Domain-specific Information Retrieval (IR) is generally challenging because of the rare datasets or benchmarks, niche vocabularies and more limited literature coverage. Legal IR is no exception and presents other obstacles, reinforcing the need for innovation and, sometimes, paradigm shifts. Doctrine, one of the largest Legaltech companies in Europe, dedicates an entire data science team to advance on these problems and identify new opportunities. In this presentation, we provide some intuition regarding the specificities of legal IR (e.g., what is relevance?), and we introduce some of the solutions currently used on doctrine.fr.

Particularly, we show how we use named entity recognition in the various forms of contents we host, and how it enhances the search engine. With knowledge extracted from documents, we may built large enough datasets and train learning-to-rank algorithms. This, combined with several specific-domain vocabulary enrichments to increase recall, dramatically improves the search experience for our users.