Not too long ago, there was an almost evangelical fervor that search technology could solve the problems of discovery within large volumes of electronic records for litigation. Legal technology startups bragged that their learning machines, clustering technology, or concept search technology could find a smoking gun e-mail out of millions of documents.
But as the profession wrestles with the challenge of searching electronic records, it has become clear that exotic technology alone is not the solution. "Computer algorithms are getting better, but they will never get the same results as when there is a person in the loop or human intervention is part of the search process," says Dan Brassil, manager of Linguistic Technology with H5 Technologies. "The question is where the humans fit into the picture."
For several years now, the Text Retrieval Conference Legal Track has tested different types of computer searches to create industry best practices for searching electronic records in litigation. Starting last year, the project added a new investigation into the role of human researchers in improving the search results from computers, called the Interactive Task.
Researchers in the TREC project are discovering there are roles that are best provided by machines and those done by human beings. "We use humans to do what they are very good at, which is to make nuanced judgments in specific cases," says Brassil. "But they are not so good at judgments across a lot of documents. People get tired, allow inferences to creep in, and you never know what a person will say in terms of consistency. That's where machines come in."
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Source: law.com
By: Jason Krause
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