A text mining approach to assist the general public in the retrieval of legal documents

Applying text mining techniques to legal issues has been an emerging research topic in recent years. Although some previous studies focused on assisting professionals in the retrieval of related legal documents, they did not take into account the general public and their difficulty in describing legal problems in professional legal terms. Because this problem has not been addressed by previous research, this study aims to design a text‐mining‐based method that allows the general public to use everyday vocabulary to search for and retrieve criminal judgments. The experimental results indicate that our method can help the general public, who are not familiar with professional legal terms, to acquire relevant criminal judgments more accurately and effectively.