Similarity analysis of court judgments using clustering of case citation data: a study

Information retrieval (IR) is an automatic mechanism to extract required information from a collection of unstructured or semi-structured data. IR systems minimize the effort of a user to locate the information based on the requirements. Clustering of documents is carried out as a preprocessing step for filtering irrelevant information in an IR system. Legal domain is a producer as well as consumer of huge in-formation which also contains invaluable legal knowledge and its interpretation. Knowledge based legal information retrieval systems is need of the day. Citation analysis is a technique to find the hidden relationships between the documents and is used for understanding knowledge transfer across various domains and hence becomes very important in legal domain. In this study, similarities among documents are analyzed using data clustering when applied on data of citations in court judgments.