COMPUTER-BASED SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR FINDING RULES OF LAW INTEXT

A system and method for binary classification of text units such as sentence s, paragraphs and documents as either a rule of law (ROL) or not a rule of law (~ROL) (206). During a training phase (202) of the system and method of the present invention, an initialized knowledge base and labeled or pre-classifi ed sentences are used to build a trained knowledge base. The trained knowledge base contains an equation (404), a threshold (405), and a plurality of statistical values called Z values (502). When inputting text documents for classification, a Z value is generated for each term or token in the input text. The Z values are input to the equation which calculates a score for ea ch sentence. Each calculated score is compared to the threshold to classify eac h sentence as either ROL or ~ROL.