# Hier-SPCNet: A Legal Statute Hierarchy-based Heterogeneous Network for Computing Legal Case Document Similarity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.03225 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03225/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [LeSICiN: A Heterogeneous Graph-based Approach for Automatic Legal Statute Identification from Indian Legal Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14731/) (2021)
- [Bringing order into the realm of Transformer-based language models for artificial intelligence and law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05502/) (2023)
- [Case law retrieval: problems, methods, challenges and evaluations in the last 20 years](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07209/) (2022)
- [Logic Rules as Explanations for Legal Case Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01457/) (2024)
- [IL-PCSR: Legal Corpus for Prior Case and Statute Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00268/) (2025)
- [Legal Element-oriented Modeling with Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Legal Case Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05188/) (2022)
- [ClaimGen-CN: A Large-scale Chinese Dataset for Legal Claim Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17234/) (2025)
- [Analysing the Resourcefulness of the Paragraph for Precedence Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01203/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Criminal Case Matching through Diverse Legal Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11172/) (2024)
- [A Method for Detecting Legal Article Competition for Korean Criminal Law Using a Case-augmented Mention Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11787/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computing similarity between two legal case documents is an important and challenging task in Legal IR, for which text-based and network-based measures have been proposed in literature. All prior network-based similarity methods considered a precedent citation network among case documents only (PCNet). However, this approach misses an important source of legal knowledge -- the hierarchy of legal statutes that are applicable in a given legal jurisdiction (e.g., country). We propose to augment the PCNet with the hierarchy of legal statutes, to form a heterogeneous network Hier-SPCNet, having citation links between case documents and statutes, as well as citation and hierarchy links among the statutes. Experiments over a set of Indian Supreme Court case documents show that our proposed heterogeneous network enables significantly better document similarity estimation, as compared to existing approaches using PCNet. We also show that the proposed network-based method can complement text-based measures for better estimation of legal document similarity.