# Combining topic modelling and citation network analysis to study case law from the European Court on Human Rights on the right to respect for private and family life

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16429 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16429/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [Top2Vec: Distributed Representations of Topics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09470/) (2020)
- [CLAUDETTE: an Automated Detector of Potentially Unfair Clauses in Online Terms of Service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01217/) (2018)
- [Automatic Text Summarization of Legal Cases: A Hybrid Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09119/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Topic Classification of Case Law Using a Large Language Model and a New Taxonomy for UK Law: AI Insights into Summary Judgment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12910/) (2024)
- [Unveiling Themes in Judicial Proceedings: A Cross-Country Study Using Topic Modeling on Legal Documents from India and the UK](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00040/) (2024)
- [An explainable approach to detect case law on housing and eviction issues within the HUDOC database](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02978/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As legal case law databases such as HUDOC continue to grow rapidly, it has become essential for legal researchers to find efficient methods to handle such large-scale data sets. Such case law databases usually consist of the textual content of cases together with the citations between them. This paper focuses on case law from the European Court of Human Rights on Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, the right to respect private and family life, home and correspondence. In this study, we demonstrate and compare the potential of topic modelling and citation network to find and organize case law on Article 8 based on their general themes and citation patterns, respectively. Additionally, we explore whether combining these two techniques leads to better results compared to the application of only one of the methods. We evaluate the effectiveness of the combined method on a unique manually collected and annotated dataset of Aricle 8 case law on evictions. The results of our experiments show that our combined (text and citation-based) approach provides the best results in finding and grouping case law, providing scholars with an effective way to extract and analyse relevant cases on a specific issue.