COMPUTER BASED SYSTEM FOR CLASSIFYING DOCUMENTS INTO A HIERARCHY AND LINKING THE CLASSIFICATIONS TO THE HIERARCHY

A computer system uses a legal hierarchy annotated with seed citations to generate a control file, and then using the control file, permits legal documents to be classified automatically into the legal hierarchy without the need for manual intervention. Each classification within the legal hierarchy receives a unique numerical classification key which identifies the location of the classification within the legal hierarchy. Each level of the hierarchy also receives a unique hierarchy location key which identifies a hierarchical document through which a user can retrieve a legal document which displays to the user a classification. The control file is an automatically-generated intermediate file which identifies the legal classifications, their classification keys, and the hierarchy location keys to which the classifications map. This automatically generated control file is input to a legal classification generator, along with a document to be classified. The unclassified legal document is scanned electronically for citations, which are stripped and normalized, and then compared to the seed citations in the control file for matches. For each match which occurs, each new classification with which the seed citation was associated is stored in memory along with a numerical initial classification score of zero; and each previously-identified classification results in the classification score being incremented. Heuristic rules are employed to increment the classification scores based on the seed citation matched. After all citations have been checked against the seed citations, all classification scores are checked against a threshold value. If the classification score for any particular classification is greater than or equal to the threshold value, then the classification key and the hierarchy location key associated with the classification are inserted into the legal document.