'Lost for words': semantic search in the Find Case Law service of The National Archives

Access to case law is vital for safeguarding the constitutional right of access to justice.

It enables members of the public to understand their position when facing litigation and to scrutinise court judgements.

Since April 2022, UK court and tribunal decisions are preserved by The National Archives' Find Case Law service as freely accessible online public records. This project seeks to improve Find Case Law by enhancing it with meaning-sensitive (semantic) search functionality.

It will study how individuals without legal training use language to navigate court judgments and it will develop tools to facilitate this navigation.

In most digital cultural heritage catalogues, while we can search for words within the metadata describing their records, we cannot search for records based on the meaning of words contained within these records, for example the different words to refer to "knife crime". Therefore, users' access to collection is determined by their ability to articulate their information need precisely.

Recent advances in natural language processing unlock new possibilities for querying documents via state-of-the-art semantic search.

Incorporating such search capabilities in the Find Case Law collection is crucial for democratising access to digital collections, helping expose the social impact of how the law is written.