Application of Case-based Reasoning for Amharic Legal Precedent Retrieval: A Case Study with the Ethiopian Labor Law
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Date
2002-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This Research is concerned with the development of a Case-Based Reasoning (CBR)
based precedent retrieval system in the domain of Ethiopian Labor Law. The requirement
for the system was to build a knowledge base in which complete decided cases could be
entered and then recalled when similar cases arose again.
Standard case representation to the original knowledge source (legal cases) has been used
to store legal cases. Legal cases have a predefined case structure with a number of
features. The features are extracted to reflect the important aspects of a legal case. Given
a new case, the feature values are used to do the search for a similar case from the casebase.
Content based matching mechanism is used in the retrieval process. Content based
matching matches the equivalent parts of the target and the source cases and calculates
the degree of similarity according to the number of features matched, and feature
weights.
To increase the retrieval effectiveness, a mechanism for feature importance value
(weight) assignment was required. The approach adopted takes into account domain
experts' opinions to assign weights to the features.
A Case-Based Reasoning prototype has been implemented by using the CBR-Works
toolkit. To facilitate the insertion of additional cases and searching, an online interface
has also been included.
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Keywords
Case-based Reasoning