HI
I am building an argument map from a complex court case that has passed through three levels of courts:
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Civil Court (city level)
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High Court (state level)
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Supreme Court (the apex court of the country)
The verdict from the Supreme Court records the claims and the verdicts given by the lower courts, and the appeal that brought the case to the Supreme Court.
Then it proceeds to analyze the case and gives the final verdict.
By nature, each Supreme Court case involves a new interpretation of statutes. It is complex, so it is best analyzed by decomposing it using an argument map (or an IBIS graph).
While building the argument map, I came across an interesting thought: Can yEd analyze the graph to find potentially related nodes?
To be specific, in an Argument Map, a given node can oppose or support other node only if it follows the Rabbit rule:
The Rabbit Rule: Every significant word, phrase or concept appearing in the contention of a simple argument must also appear in one of the premises/reasons (Van Gelder, 2010).
In other words, can yEd find which nodes have common terms in their texts?
If yEd has this capability, analyzing a complex case will become easy and accurate:
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Break down the verdict text in simple logical statements,
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Copy them into an excel sheet,
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Assign a unique ID number to each logic statement
(this ensures backward traceability).
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Import all nodes into yEd without edges.
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Run the engine that makes clusters of nodes that have common word(s).
Here, common words such as "is", "are", "the", "a", "an", "all", "there", "this", "that".... should be ignored.
Some clusters may overlap, because they have some common words.
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User takes each cluster and checks them manually to see if they can be linked (draw "supports" or "opposes" edges between them)
Is there any feature that allows me to do this?
In theory, we can search for clusters in Excel also, but IINW Excel does not have this capability.