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.
