Systems, methods, and software for identifying relevant legal documents

To facilitate legal research, companies, such as Thomson West provide subscription-based online information-retrieval systems. Seeking to improve these and/or related systems, the present inventors devised, among other things, an exemplary legal research system that performs a conventional search to identify a set of starter documents and then leverages the metadata associated with these starter documents to identify another larger set of relevant documents. Documents in this alternate set are then scored using, for example, a learning machine and feature vectors that account for metadata relationships between the starter documents and alternate documents. 为了便于法律研究，例如Thomson West的公司提供了基于订阅的联机信息检索系统。寻求改善这些和/或相关的系统，本发明人尤其设计了示例性的法律研究系统，该系统执行常规的搜索以识别组起始文件，然后影响与这些起始文件相关的元数据以便识别另较大的相关文件组。然后例如利用学习机和特征向量为该备选的组中的文件评分，所述特征向量说明所述起始文件与备选文件之间的元数据关系。