CATO - An Intelligent Tutoring Environment CATO was developed by Vincent Aleven . It is an intelligent environment for teaching skills of making arguments with cases to law students. CATO is based on HYPO's model of case-based argumentation , but also includes a number of new ideas.
Factors are binary, and favor either the plaintiff, or the defendant in a lawsuit.
Cases are compared in terms of factors, and similarity is defined by the conclusiveness of shared sets of factors, which corresponds to the way lawyers use cases in their arguments. One of the most notable differences is that CATO also has knowledge about more abstract legal issues and concerns represented in its Factor Hierarchy, which allows it to make very advanced arguments about the relevance of distinctions. When working with CATO, students use a set of tools, that allow them to engage in Theory-Testing exercises, where they can use the cases in the Case Database to work with the factors to understand the interaction strength and weaknesses. In the past, indexing textual cases for a CBR system has been a manual chore, and methods to automate this task are very desirable. The cases in CATO's Case Database have been added over the course of many years, leading to a unique collection.