Patent ID: 8396882

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of generating an issue library from a corpus of documents defining a citation network, the method comprising: semantically linking, by a computing device, electronic documents within the corpus of documents by pairing reasons-for-citing in citing documents with cited-text-areas in cited documents, wherein a cited-text-area in a cited document is a text area that has a highest similarity value of text present within the cited document; storing citation entries associated with the semantically-linked electronic documents in a citation-pairing metadata file; searching the citation entries of the citation-pairing metadata file for reasons-for-citing and cited-text-areas that are semantically similar to at least one issue to thereby group similar documents and reasons-for-citing by issue; creating a group of semantically-similar reasons-for-citing and cited-text-areas that are semantically similar to the at least one issue; and storing information regarding groups of semantically-similar reasons-for-citing and cited-text-areas in an issue library metadata entity, wherein each issue library metadata entity is associated with an individual-issue, and each issue library metadata entity comprises: an issue identifier corresponding to the at least one issue; at least one taxonomy topic under which the issue identifier is located; and a plurality of issue instances under the at least one taxonomy topic, wherein each issue instance comprises a reason-for-citing or a cited-text-area in a document, each reason-for-citing or cited-text-area being semantically similar to one another and associated with the issue identifier.