An Ontological Chinese Legal Consultation System

We propose an ontological Chinese legal consultation system (CLCS) based on Chinese legal characteristics by integrating statutes and judicial precedents to facilitate the retrieval of relevant statutes and judgments for the general public. Ontology, an emerging research topic in recent years, incorporates a hierarchical structure and supports logical reasoning, which can reduce semantic ambiguities and extract implied semantic information. We constructed statutes ontology and a case ontology using a bottom-up method and a top-down method, respectively. Then, to test the retrieval precision of the proposed CLCS, we performed experiments using emotional damage compensation as an example by combining genetic algorithm and k-nearest neighbor approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves retrieval precision.