TREC Legal Track 2008 Tackles Human Role In Ediscovery Tasks

The 2008 Text Retrieval Conference Legal Track has explored the role of humans in conducting ediscovery tasks. Now on its third year in of technical research on how to use search technology in litigation, explores how the human factor becomes an important aspect in search technology in litigation. Jason Krause for Law.com reports:

The Text Retrieval Conference Legal Track 2008 has completed a third year of technical research on how to use search technology in litigation. Over the years, TREC Legal Track has become a proving ground to test advanced search technology as applied to e-discovery tasks. In 2008, it also explored a different aspect of the e-discovery problem: the role of human beings.

TREC Legal Track is a litigation-focused research project that explores and exploits the limitations of search technology in litigation. The ultimate goal is to develop objective criteria for comparing methods of searching large collections of documents in civil litigation. "We've come a long way in the current state of the art in artificial intelligence, but we've just begun to recognize that humans, and not just computing power, are vitally important," says Bruce Hedin of H5, a legal technology industry researcher and a coordinator for TREC Legal Track.

The Legal Track compared the commonly used Boolean keyword search strategy, which uses commands like "AND," "OR" and proximity searching, to newer search technologies using clusters, concepts and probability theories to discovery content relevant to a legal dispute. Using a database of tobacco litigation documents and fictitious legal complaints as a starting point, Boolean searchers returned between 22 and 57 percent of all relevant documents. But it turned out that more advanced search technology wasn't able to do much better than Boolean searching.

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