ABSTRACT
Last year, the United States Supreme Court wrote over 5,000 pages of opinions, published in 5 volumes. Federal Courts of Appeal accounted for another 40,000 pages reported in 27 volumes. District Courts added about the same amount. In addition to a smaller body of statutes and regulations, these documents together with the thousands of volumes that preceded them, constitute much of the law in this country. Moreover, every attorney is expected to be able to “find the law” (usually court decisions) that applies to the situation of his or her client. This research task is difficult and time consuming. Yet this is just one example of a widespread problem: how to find information in large bodies of text. It is faced by scientists looking for research articles, historians looking for newspaper stories, and managers looking for corporate documents.
