System and methods for prospective legal research

Non-computer readable media comprising program code stored thereon for execution by a programmable processor to perform a method for conducting prospective legal research comprising:

• program code for preprocessing a set of documents with a functional weighting scheme placing an increased weight on one or more documents within a recent time interval;
• program code for receiving an initiated user question at a graphical user interface comprising one or more search terms;
• program code for performing query expansion on the received search query;
• program code for identifying one or more documents that are responsive to the expanded search query;
• program code for determining an optimal number of topics for latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) modeling;
• program code for setting the optimal number of topics to between four and six for LDA modeling;
• program code for identifying a plurality of responsive documents that reference future development by determining whether the one or more responsive documents contains at least one of a future term and a relevant feature, wherein a relevant feature comprises at least one of a prospective legal phrase, a rare temporal phrase, an entity tag and a part of speech tag, wherein a first of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future development contains a future date comprising an explicit future date, a second of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future development contains a future date comprising a future date phrase, and a third of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future development contains a future date comprising a future date range;
• program code for calculating a cosine similarity using term-frequency-inverse document frequency vectorization for the one or more responsive documents;
• program code for grouping, using the calculated cosine similarity, the one or more responsive documents that reference future development into one or more document clusters;
• program code for identifying a topic for each of the one or more document clusters from the calculated cosine similarity;
• and
• program code for presenting the one or more document clusters and the associated topics at the graphical user interface, wherein the graphic user interface includes therein a timeline depicting future dates relating to the at least one of the one or more response documents that reference future developments, including at least one solid interval and at least one fuzzy interval on the timeline, each of the intervals corresponding to at least one of the explicit future date of the first of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future developments the future date phrase of the second of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future
• developments, and the future date range of the third of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future developments.

A system for conducting prospective legal research comprising:

• a server including a processor configured to:
• preprocess a set of documents with a functional weighting scheme placing an increased weight on one or more documents within a recent time interval;
• receive an initiated user question at a graphical user interface comprising one or more search terms;
• perform query expansion on the received search query;
• identify one or more documents that are responsive to the expanded search query;
• determine an optimal number of topics for latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) modeling;
• set the optimal number of topics to between four and six for LDA modeling;
• identify a plurality of responsive documents that reference future development by determining whether the one or more responsive documents contains at least one of a future term and a relevant feature, wherein a relevant feature comprises at least one of a prospective legal phrase, a rare temporal phrase, an entity tag and a part of speech tag, wherein a first of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future development contains a future date comprising an explicit future date, a second of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future development contains a future date comprising a future date phrase, and a third of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future development contains a future date comprising a future date range;
• calculate a cosine similarity using term-frequency-inverse document frequency vectorization for the one or more responsive documents;
• group, using the calculated cosine similarity, the one or more responsive documents that reference future development into one or more document clusters;
• identify a topic for each of the one or more document clusters from the calculated cosine similarity;
• and
• present the one or more document clusters and the associated topics at the graphical user interface, wherein the graphic user interface includes therein a timeline depicting future dates relating to the at least one of the one or more response documents that reference future developments, including at least one solid interval and at least one fuzzy interval on the timeline, each of the intervals corresponding to at least one of the explicit future date of the first of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future developments the future date phrase of the second of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future developments, and the future date range of the third of the plurality of responsive documents that reference future developments.