Feedback on current files

[mlissner]

I'm finally looking at this again, and I think we're not going to be able to use anything here in Free Law Project. I'm bummed about this, so I figure I'll give some reasoning.

I'll also be updating our source file with Indigo Book abbreviations/synonyms, so I'll provide a PR for that once it's ready.

Some comments:

• US Code synonym files:

  • First, I don't know what "dice scores" are. It might be helpful if there was an explanation in the readme, even if it just said, these are more coarse, those are more granular.

  • Looking at the files, there are a lot of false synonyms. For example, the following three lines are grabbed at random:

    authorizations, assistance
    established, plan, security, amended, period, programs, commission, provide, prior, including
    office, plan, security, amended, period, programs, commission, provide, prior, including

    I'm not sure what Solr implementation would want those equivalences. Maybe I misunderstand something.

• GAO synonyms are similarly too coarse for legal purposes. They're better, but our users (and most legal users, I think) would be alarmed by something like: acknowledgment, amendments.

Anyway, just some feedback now that I'm finally looking at this for use at CourtListener (sorry for the EXTREME delay!). Maybe the fix is to document this somewhere so people know what they're looking at?

I'll send a PR to update our synonym file as soon as I can get it munged into a working format.