WolframAlpha & Legal Research

[Rob Richards]

Colleagues:

Over on the blog, we've started to discuss the role of WolframAlpha in legal research. Some findings on W/A's responses to legal questions are in the comments .... What are your thoughts on W/A and legal research?

Regards,

Rob Richards

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Robert C. Richards, Jr., J.D.*, M.S.L.I.S., M.A.
Law Librarian & Legal Information Consultant
Philadelphia, PA
[e-mail]
Legal Informatics Blog: http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com
Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources:
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* Member New York bar, retired status.
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[Rob Richards]

Jim Milles referred us to Greg Lambert's post: http://bit.ly/126nkZ : "For Legal Research, however, WolframAlpha just isn't ready for that" -- Rob Richards

[Susanna Leers]

I took a quick spin around WolframAlpha yesterday. I asked 2 questions that requested very basic data: the first one was "How many US Federal Judges are women?" It choked (answered "Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.” Then I asked "How many justices are on the US Supreme Court?". Again, the answer was "Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”
Finally I just entered "Supreme Court" in the search box, thinking that surely that would get some kind of response.. but no, again I got "Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.”
So I would say it's got a long way to go, or else we really need to be educated on what data is or isn't in there.

[stephanie davidson]

I also asked it about basic Supreme Court stats, thinking surely the StatAbs data was in there -- no go. "How many Supreme Court cases decided?" But for salary, unemployment, and other labor info (which we have to provide periodically), it did fine ("unemployment alabama", "unemployment u.s. vs. germany", and "lawyer salary germany"). I agree that we need to learn more about the data it includes, but the parsing algorithms seem promising.

[Scott Frey]

Government and libraries are "future topics" for Wolfram|Alpha. While we wait for the future, we can still appreciate Wolfram|Alpha for its good results on some topics and strange results on others (e.g., justice of the supreme court!).

[Richard Leiter]

Wolfram Alpha just isn't quite ready for Prime Time, and I think that you can get a good clue about why that is from an interview with Steve Wolfram conducted last weekend by Leo Laporte. You can find the interview, it's about 30 minutes long, after the conclusion of the regular TWIT podcast of May 17. As Wolfram explains it, WA isn't a search engine, but an aggregator. The trouble is that there's apparently little way to direct the aggregation; and, in the course of explaining why that is, he drifts into explaining Evolutionary Theory....WA is also part AI.

[Greg Lambert]

Rob and friends... I ran some of the same searches that we did in Wolfram Alpha in the new Google Squared semantic search tool that was released to the public yesterday. I blogged about the results on 3 Geeks and you can go there to see the results.

I found the G² search to be really interesting, and found some "glitches" in the search structure. In G² it seems that the pattern of your search query will change the results. So, if you search for "Patents IBM" you get nothing back... but, if you search "IBM Patents" you do get a result. Pretty interesting results.

I also searched Scott Frey's "Justices of Supreme Court" and found that G² actually gave me US Supreme Court Justices, rather than towns in Illinois and Louisiana.

Anyone else tried out Google Squared yet?

[Rob Richards]

Greg: This is terrific; thanks very much. I plan to look at G² and Bing this week and I'll post on them shortly.

Greg Lambert said:

Rob and friends... I ran some of the same searches that we did in Wolfram Alpha in the new Google Squared semantic search tool that was released to the public yesterday. I blogged about the results on 3 Geeks and you can go there to see the results.

I found the G² search to be really interesting, and found some "glitches" in the search structure. In G² it seems that the pattern of your search query will change the results. So, if you search for "Patents IBM" you get nothing back... but, if you search "IBM Patents" you do get a result. Pretty interesting results.

I also searched Scott Frey's "Justices of Supreme Court" and found that G² actually gave me US Supreme Court Justices, rather than towns in Illinois and Louisiana.

Anyone else tried out Google Squared yet?

[Deborah McGovern]

Here's my take on WolframAlpha's utility for legal research Want a Website that Does Calculus?