Is text mining on trade claim studies applicable? Focused on chinese cases of arbitration and litigation applying the cisg

Purpose – This is an exploratory study that aims to apply text mining techniques, which computationally extracts words from the large-scale text data, to legal documents to quantify trade claim contents and enables statistical analysis. Design/methodology – This is designed to verify the validity of the application of text mining techniques as a quantitative methodology for trade claim studies, that have relied mainly on a qualitative approach. The subjects are 81 cases of arbitration and court judgments from China published on the website of the UNCITRAL where the CISG was applied. Validation is performed by comparing the manually analyzed result with the automatically analyzed result. The manual analysis result is the cluster analysis wherein the researcher reads and codes the case. The automatic analysis result is an analysis applying text mining techniques to the result of the cluster analysis. Topic modeling and semantic network analysis are applied for the statistical approach. Findings – Results show that the results of cluster analysis and text mining results are consistent with each other and the internal validity is confirmed. And the degree centrality of words that play a key role in the topic is high as the between centrality of words that are useful for grasping the topic and the eigenvector centrality of the important words in the topic is high. This indicates that text mining techniques can be applied to research on content analysis of trade claims for statistical analysis. Originality/value – Firstly, the validity of the text mining technique in the study of trade claim cases is confirmed. Prior studies on trade claims have relied on traditional approach. Secondly, this study has an originality in that it is an attempt to quantitatively study the trade claim cases, whereas prior trade claim cases were mainly studied via qualitative methods. Lastly, this study shows that the use of the text mining can lower the barrier for acquiring information from a large amount of digitalized text.