Parenthetical fields?

[mlissner]

A client writes:

I'm a little confused by some of the fields in the csv. "described_opinion_id" and "describing_opinion_id" are rather obvious, but what is "group_id"? I know that many of the parentheticals are grouped by some sort of similarity, so is this what this id refers to?

In addition, what does the "score" value represent?

[mlissner]

We get a lot of parentheticals that are nearly identical. When we do, we group them together and all the similar parentheticals get the same group_id value. You can see this in action when you look at our website, where things are grouped together:

The score is how we order the summaries on our site. It's based on a pretty simple scoring system so that the best parentheticals go to the top of the page. The best way to understand the score is to read the code:

https://github.com/freelawproject/courtlistener/blob/c38845e4b27502c67644e501fa83468d98fcdc8e/cl/citations/score_parentheticals.py

[amitnagar]

Sorry but not obvious to me - what is the difference between "described_opinion_id" and "describing_opinion_id" in a parenthetical.

My assumption - The opinion being summarized by the parenthetical is the described opinion.

If the above is correct then what does the describing opinion refer to?

Thanks

[mlissner]

Well, when an opinion describes another, the one doing the describing is the describing_opinion_id, and the one being described is the described_opinion_id. Does that help?

[amitnagar]

Thanks Michael.

So in the below example the summary is for opinion 1273120 OR 4643569?

id,text,score,described_opinion_id,describing_opinion_id,group_id
"2618061","“The imposition of lifetime parole is not tantamount to a sentence of life imprisonment.”","0.464","1273120","4643569","2287586"

Thank You.

[mlissner]

Well, it's the summary of the described opinion, as I said, and the described opinion is 1273120.

[amitxenai]

It is clear now.
Thanks for the patience.