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Search Requests Overview

Brief Bank supports two types of search requests:

A Natural Language or  any words  search is any sequence of text, like a sentence or a question.  In an "any words" search, use quotation marks around phrases, put + in front of any word or phrase that is required, and - in front of a word or phrase to exclude it.  Examples:

banana pear "apple pie"

"apple pie" -salad +"ice cream"

A Boolean search request consists of a group of words or phrases linked by connectors such as and and or that indicate the relationship between them. Examples:

If you use more than one connector, you should use parentheses to indicate precisely what you want to search for. For example, apple and pear or orange juice could mean (apple and pear) or orange, or it could mean apple and (pear or orange).

Noise words, such as if and the, are ignored in searches.

Search terms may include the following special characters:

Words and Phrases

Use quotation marks to indicate a phrase.  You can use a phrase anywhere in a search request. Example:

apple w/5 "fruit salad"

If a phrase contains a noise word, Brief Bank will skip over the noise word when searching for it. For example, a search for statue of liberty would retrieve any document containing the word statue, any intervening word, and the word liberty.

Punctuation inside of a search word is treated as a space. Thus, can't would be treated as a phrase consisting of two words: can and t. 1843(c)(8)(ii) would become 1843 c 8 ii (four words).

Wildcards (* and ?)

A search word can contain the wildcard characters * and ?. A ? in a word matches any single character, and a * matches any number of characters. The wildcard characters can be in any position in a word. For example:

appl* would match apple, application, etc.
*cipl* would match principle, participle, etc.
appl? would match apply and apple but not apples.
ap*ed would match applied, approved, etc.

Use of the * wildcard character near the beginning of a word will slow searches somewhat.

Natural Language Searching

A natural language search request is any combination of words, phrases, or sentences. After a natural language search, Brief Bank sorts retrieved documents by their relevance to your search request. Weighting of retrieved documents takes into account: the number of documents each word in your search request appears in (the more documents a word appears in, the less useful it is in distinguishing relevant from irrelevant documents); the number of times each word in the request appears in the documents; and the density of hits in each document. Noise words and search connectors like NOT and OR are ignored.

Variable Term Weighting

When Brief Bank sorts search results after a search, by default all words in a request count equally in counting hits. However, you can change this by specifying the relative weights for each term in your search request, like this:

apple:5 and pear:1

This request would retrieve the same documents as apple and pear but, Brief Bank would weight apple five times as heavily as pear when sorting the results.

In a natural language search, Brief Bank automatically weights terms based on an analysis of their distribution within the documents. If you provide specific term weights in a natural language search, these weights will override the weights Brief Bank would otherwise assign.

AND Connector

Use the AND connector in a search request to connect two expressions, both of which must be found in any document retrieved. For example:

apple pie and poached pear would retrieve any document that contained both phrases.

(apple or banana) and (pear w/5 grape) would retrieve any document that (1) contained either apple OR banana, AND (2) contained pear within 5 words of grape.

OR Connector

Use the OR connector in a search request to connect two expressions, at least one of which must be found in any document retrieved. For example, apple pie or poached pear would retrieve any document that contained apple pie, poached pear, or both.

W/N Connector

Use the W/N connector in a search request to specify that one word or phrase must occur within N words of the other. For example, apple w/5 pear would retrieve any document that contained apple within 5 words of pear. The following are examples of search requests using W/N:

(apple or pear) w/5 banana
(apple w/5 banana) w/10 pear
(apple and banana) w/10 pear

Some types of complex expressions using the W/N connector will produce ambiguous results and should not be used. The following are examples of ambiguous search requests:

(apple and banana) w/10 (pear and grape)
(apple w/10 banana) w/10 (pear and grape)

In general, at least one of the two expressions connected by W/N must be a single word or phrase or a group of words and phrases connected by OR. Example:

(apple and banana) w/10 (pear or grape)
(apple and banana) w/10 orange tree

Brief Bank uses two built in search words to mark the beginning and end of a file: xfirstword and xlastword. The terms are useful if you want to limit a search to the beginning or end of a file. For example, apple w/10 xlastword would search for apple within 10 words of the end of a document.

NOT and NOT W/N

Use NOT in front of any search expression to reverse its meaning. This allows you to exclude documents from a search. Example:

apple sauce and not pear

NOT standing alone can be the start of a search request. For example, not pear would retrieve all documents that did not contain pear.

If NOT is not the first connector in a request, you need to use either AND or OR with NOT:

apple or not pear
not (apple w/5 pear)

The NOT W/ ("not within") operator allows you to search for a word or phrase not in association with another word or phrase. Example:

apple not w/20 pear

Unlike the W/ operator, NOT W/ is not symmetrical. That is, apple not w/20 pear is not the same as pear not w/20 apple. In the apple not w/20 pear request, Brief Bank searches for apple and excludes cases where apple is too close to pear. In the pear not w/20 apple request, Brief Bank searches for pear and excludes cases where pear is too close to apple.

Numeric Range Searching

A numeric range search is a search for any numbers that fall within a range. To add a numeric range component to a search request, enter the upper and lower bounds of the search separated by ~~ like this:

apple w/5 12~~17

This request would find any document containing apple within 5 words of a number between 12 and 17.

Numeric range searches only work with positive integers. A numeric range search includes the upper and lower bounds (so 12 and 17 would be retrieved in the above example).

For purposes of numeric range searching, decimal points and commas are treated as spaces and minus signs are ignored. For example, -123,456.78 would be interpreted as: 123 456 78 (three numbers). Using alphabet customization, the interpretation of punctuation characters can be changed. For example, if you change the comma and period from space to ignore, then 123,456.78 would be interpreted as 12345678.

File Naming Conventions:

Each brief has been named using the following naming conventions:

1. Last Name of Defendant (up to 8 letters)

2. First Name of Defendant (up to 3 letters)

3. Court   (2 numbers)

4. Last Name of Attorney (up to 8 letters)

5. Type of Brief  (3 Letters)

6. Year the brief was filed (4 spaces)

         Example:
                     SmithJoh01_JonesAOB2003
                     Alay-MarBor01_BrownRBR1999