WestSearch Plus: A Non-factoid Question-Answering System for the Legal Domain

Gayle McElvain, George Sanchez, Seán Matthews, Don Teo, Filippo Pompili, Tonya Custis

Abstract: We present a non-factoid QA system that provides legally accurate, jurisdictionally relevant, and conversationally responsive answers to user-entered questions in the legal domain. This commercially available system is entirely based on NLP and IR, and does not rely on a structured knowledge base. WestSearch Plus aims to provide concise one sentence answers for basic questions about the law. It is not restricted in scope to particular topics or jurisdictions. The corpus of potential answers contains approximately 22M documents classified to over 120K legal topics.