Epistemic Structured Representation for Legal Transcript Analysis

HTML based standards and the new XML based standards for digital transcripts generated by court recorders offer more search and analysis options than the traditional CAT (Computer Aided Transcription) technology. The LegalXml standards are promising opportunities for new methods of search for legal documents. However, the search techniques employed are still largely restricted to keyword search and various probabitistic association techniques. Rather than keyword and association searches, we are interested in semantic and inference-based search. In this paper, a process for transforming the semistructured representation of the digital transcript to an epistemic structured representation that supports semantic and inference-based search is explored.