IIIT Hyderabad wins best paper award at JURIX 2024 for improving legal precedent retrieval

Hyderabad: A research team from the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) has won the Best Paper Award at JURIX 2024 for a study on improving legal precedent retrieval using citation context in Supreme Court judgements.

The study, led by Gaurang Patil, a second-year MS by Research student, and supervised by Prof. P.K. Reddy, focused on the text surrounding legal citations to enhance the way prior judgements are represented and retrieved. The paper, titled “Citation Anchor Text for Improving Precedent Retrieval: An Experimental Study on Indian Legal Documents,” was presented at the 37th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2024), held in the Czech Republic from December 11–13, 2024.

The research draws inspiration from the concept of anchor text used in web pages, where clickable text offers context about the linked content. “Anchor text provided a concise representation of linked webpages, improving web search quality in the early internet. We wanted to explore if this idea could be applied to legal documents,” said Gaurang.

Using publicly available Supreme Court judgements from the Indian Kanoon website, the team extracted and analyzed the text preceding legal citations across two datasets. Their approach showed that using citation context improved the representation of the referenced judgement, leading to better retrieval performance.

“Compared to existing methods, using text around the citation enhances how prior judgements are represented, which in turn improves how effectively they can be retrieved,” Gaurang explained.

Document representation refers to how a document is structured for processing by machines, especially in information retrieval. The team’s work lays the foundation for further developments, including summarising court judgements using improved document representations. The study was supported by iHub Anubhuti-IIITD Foundation.