Using GHSOM to construct legal maps for Taiwan's securities and futures markets

A good legal knowledge representation system, capable of effectively providing investors with comprehensive legal knowledge, is needed for investors to prevent erratic behavior before investment decisions. This is especially important in Taiwan’s securities and futures markets because the majority of market participants are individual investors who have limited access to legal knowledge about markets. Besides, the construction of the knowledge representation has to be automatic in order to efficiently handle the fast-growing and changeable legal information. Thus, we use the GHSOM algorithm to present a content-based and easy-to-use map hierarchy for Chinese legal documents in the securities and futures markets in the Chinese language. Meanwhile, an enhanced topic selection module and a web-based user interface are also proposed. The maps can be browsed on the web site (http://synteny.iis.sinica.edu.tw/legalmap/). To evaluate the legal maps, we apply two approaches, namely a validity test and a task experiment. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.