Main entry point is index.py. Helper files are InputOutput.py, Tokenizer.py.

Indexing approach TBC, need to decide on how to approach positional indexing.

TBC.

We created a thesaurus that is specific to legal-context by scraping dictionary.law.com, forming a mapping from a legal term to a set of related terms. We then performed stemming on both the key and value since we are performing stemming on the query (otherwise the query and thesaurus would not match).

Source code for scraping can be found here.

Use whatever CPython interpreter as long as you are on 3.8.10 and have NLTK (with punkt downloaded). We can use external libraries if we package them with our code, but let's try not to.

Let's keep things consistent!

• snake_case for variables and functions
• PascalCase for classes/objects and custom types

This project will probably get big and complicated with multiple people working on it, so type hints [1] [2] are encouraged. Add custom types to Types.py and import to whichever files need it.

Dictionaries and nested dictionaries are common, so we have common atomic values like DocId and Term abstracted as custom types in Types.py to make dictionary types clearer. E.g., Dict[DocId, DocFreq] rather than Dict[int, int].

Since we are on Python 3.8.10, we will need from __future__ import annotations to get proper type hinting.