Hagiwara et al. on Extracting Dictionary Terms from Legal Text

[NOTE: Updated 6-1-2009 to add final paragraph.]

Professor Masato Hagiwara et al. of Nagoya University Graduate School of Information Science have published Bootstrapping-Based Extraction of Legal Terms from Unsegmented Legal Text, most of which is available here in full-text on Google Books. Here is the abstract:

“Recent demands for translating Japanese statutes into foreign languages necessitate the compilation of standard bilingual dictionaries. To support this costly task, we propose a bootstrapping-based lexical knowledge extraction algorithm Monaka, to automatically extract dictionary term candidates from unsegmented Japanese legal text. The algorithm is based on the Tchai algorithm and extracts reliable patterns and instances in an iterative manner, but instead uses character n-grams as contextual patterns, and introduces a special constraint to ensure proper segmentation of the extracted terms. The experimental results show that this algorithm can extract correctly segmented and important dictionary terms with higher accuracy compared to conventional methods.”

This paper, and several other papers originally delivered at the JURISIN 2008 conference, have been published in New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence JSAI 2008 Conference and Workshops, Asahikawa, Japan, June 11 – 13, 2008 ; Revised Selected Papers (Hiromitsu Hattori et al. eds., 2009), several articles of which are available from Google Book here; the WorldCat record for this book is here. The call for papers for JURISIN 2009 is available here.

To find other recent legal informatics scholarship, see the Preprints, Articles, Indexes, Dissertations, Conferences, and Monographs sections of our sister Website, Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources.

What Is Legal Information?: Conference Paper

[NOTE: Updated 22 August 2011 to update the link to the paper.]

As a next step in a project to develop a new, formal definition of “legal information,” initially discussed here, I’ve written a paper entitled “What Is Legal Information?” to be delivered at the University of Colorado Law School’s conference on Legal Information: Scholarship & Teaching, to be held in June 2009. [Other papers to be delivered at the conference appear here, and they look very interesting. The other conference papers are no longer available on Internet.] Here is the abstract:

“This paper offers a new, formal definition of ‘legal information,’ intended to exhibit nine characteristics identified as being desirable. Motives for devising a new definition of ‘legal information’ include enabling automated discovery and organization of law-related information, fostering interdisciplinary research respecting such information, and enabling law librarians to specify the basis of their professional expertise and to limit the scope of their collections and services. Three previously devised, formal definitions of ‘legal information’ are evaluated and their shortcomings identified. A new definition of ‘legal information’ is then set out, with examples. Next, the paper discusses a potential controversy respecting a subcategory of law-related information: ostensibly non-law-related information that acquires legal significance by virtue of being used to support a statement about law. A potential approach to that controversy is suggested, involving the use of the economic concept of comparative advantage.”

Rights respecting my paper are set out here. Comments on my paper are welcome, in the comments section of this blogpost. Some provisos respecting this version of my paper are in order. First, this version frames the issue for law librarians; a later version will discuss the issue in a broader legal informatics context. Second, this version addresses only the English-language scholarship, and the review of that scholarship is not complete (I’d be grateful to learn of additional sources); a later version will also address non-English language scholarship, including Erich Schweighofer, Rechtsinformatik und Wissensrepräsentation ch. 2 (1999), and the sources he discusses. Thanks in advance for your input.

[NOTE: Updated 6-24-2009 to revise link to the paper, and to remove the link to the other conference papers, since they are no longer available.]

Ekstrom et al. on Text Analysis of Ocean Law

[NOTE: Updated 5-31-2009 to add citation to related conference paper, and on 6-1-2009 to revise introductory note.]

This blog will occasionally highlight legal informatics scholarship appearing outside the principal periodicals in the field. To find other recent legal informatics scholarship, see the Preprints, Articles, Indexes, Dissertations, Conferences, and Monographs sections of our sister Website, Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources.

Julia A. Ekstrom of Stanford University, et al., have published a short communication, A Tool to Navigate Overlaps in Fragmented Ocean Governance, 33 Marine Policy 532 (2009), full text (subscription required), abstract (free), and table of contents (free), all available here. Here is the abstract:

“Implementation of marine ecosystem-based management requires improved understanding of existing governance, including gaps and overlaps resulting from fragmented management. Focusing on overlaps, this paper presents a technique using text analysis to assist in the identification of agencies and laws involved in overlaps from a system perspective. The overlaps analysis uses term frequency counts on ocean laws and regulations in conjunction with relevant agency authority. Such information delivered in a transparent user-friendly presentation can help policymakers and other constituents of ecosystem-based management to find existing overlaps as a step to facilitate improved coordination.”

Dr. Ekstrom & Dr. Gloria T. Lau of Stanford University recently presented a related paper: Exploratory Text Mining of Ocean Law to Measure Overlapping Agency and Jurisdictional Authority, 2008 Proc. Int’l Conf. on Digital Gov’t Res. 53 [a.k.a. dg.o 2008], full text (subscription required), abstract, & references all available here. Thanks to Dr. Tom Bruce for notifying me of this paper.

Akester on Effect of DRM on Permitted Uses of Works

Because digital rights management (DRM) systems are legal information systems, this blog will occasionally discuss DRM.

Dr. Patrícia Akester of the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law has made available Technological Accommodation of Conflicts Between Freedom of Expression and DRM: The First Empirical Assessment (2009). Here is the abstract:

“Copyright incentives and rewards to producers of works have been
able to exist alongside other values, such as freedom of expression.
However, changes in the way information products are being
disseminated raises questions as to whether those values remain
compatible with the new modes of dissemination.

“So far, studies devoted to digital rights management (DRM) and
copyright exceptions have noted, theoretically, its legal implications.

“This research filled an existing gap by unveiling, through empirical
lines of enquiry, (1) whether certain acts which are permitted by law
are being adversely affected by the use of DRM and (2) whether
technology can accommodate conflicts between freedom of expression
and DRM – linking, thus, policy conclusions to empirical findings.

“The survey concluded that some beneficiaries of privileged exceptions
are being adversely affected by the use of DRM and practical solutions
are required.

“Thus, it is proposed that, in the short term, with the help of the
empirical findings and recommendations of this study, the EC
Commission submits a proposal for two amendment of Article 6(4) of
the Information Society Directive, as follows:

“(1) A definition of the expression ‘appropriate measures’ should be
inserted in Article 6(4) of the Information Society Directive, stating
that for the purposes of that Directive such measures require the
establishment of a procedure to enable expeditious access to works by
beneficiaries of privileged exceptions, leading to the creation of
standardized access to works portals across EC Member States.

“The existence of access to works portals would be made possible by a
DRM deposit system, according to which the means to enable
beneficiaries of privileged exceptions to benefit from them would be
deposited and made available through access to works portals, in
specified circumstances.

“(2) It should be added to Article 6(4) of the Information Society
Directive that where access to works by beneficiaries of privileged
exceptions is not facilitated, the protection of privileged exceptions
(given their connection to core freedoms) prevails over the protection of DRM, even where works are supplied online on agreed contractual
terms.”

The Bespoke Academic Law Library

Because law libraries play an important role in legal informatics in many countries, this blog will occasionally comment on developments in law librarianship.

Marvelously intriguing comments—in connection with the upcoming AALL Workshop on the Academic Law Library of 2015—by Dean Judith Wright, Jonathan Franklin, and Barbara Garavaglia about the assessment of U.S. academic law libraries on the AALL ALL-SIS listserv [subscription required] on May 27, 2009 suggested to me the following further thoughts:

I think [the] present assessment challenges [facing U.S. academic law libraries] arise from the effects of several factors on the relationship between the academic law library and the law school: the acceptance of user-centered library service design principles, the rise of outcomes-based education, the pervasiveness[---]and improvements in discovery[---]of online digital information, the improvements in readability and navigability of resources on the major CALR services and other online scholarly resources, and the relaxation of accreditation standards and reporting requirements.

The result is that the academic law library is given enough flexibility that it can be designed to precisely meet the needs of [its] parent organization, not unlike the way a bespoke garment fits its owner. The law library’s strategic plan and services, staffing, space, and tools can be precisely aligned with the strategic plan and actual programs of the law school. This state of affairs seems highly desirable respecting user satisfaction, as a library designed exclusively to meet the actual information needs of its patrons seems more likely to succeed in satisfying those needs than a library that must also serve interests unrelated to those needs. If academic law libraries pursue this path, no two such libraries will look exactly alike or offer precisely the same services or feature precisely the same staffing, space, or tools. (This is very similar to the developments in private law libraries in the last decade.)

In this environment, precise minimum standards applicable to all academic law libraries might not be optimal. Instead, one might wish to organize library assessment into two categories of measures: (1) measures that identify users’ needs and the library’s actions intended to satisfy those needs (e.g., qualitative reporting and inspection to determine (a) the parent organization’s strategic plan and programs, and (b) the extent to which the library’s strategic plan, services, staffing, space, and tools are aligned with them); and (2) measures intended to determine (a) actual use of library services, and (b) users’ perceptions of how well the library has satisfied their needs (e.g., statistics on usage of services, both in-person and online; and [data derived from] social science [research instruments] [e.g., surveys, focus groups, and interviews] to determine users’ satisfaction with the library’s services). Overall, this assessment program looks like the qualitative/descriptive portions of the periodic ABA[] accreditation self-study and inspection documents, coupled with usage statistics and the kinds of user survey data generated by ARL’s LibQUAL+ instrument.

Collaboration with our medical school library peers might be useful, as well. The Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries appears to be dealing with very similar issues, primarily through their Assessment & Statistics Committee [] (scroll down). [The AALL ALL-SIS Statistics Committee's] communicating regularly with the AAHSL committee respecting assessment might be beneficial, as each committee might save time and effort as a result of learning from the other’s experience. (Similar collaboration appears to be occurring among law school and medical school deans and clinical faculty in connection with the skills-based instruction movement [see . . . the linked report [at 25]].) Three documents related to the work of the AAHSL assessment committee may be of particular interest [to U.S. academic law libraries respecting assessment]: their recent report, [Gary D. Byrd & Steven J. Squires,] Transforming the Evidence Base for Effective Academic Health Sciences Library Services and Resources []; Douglas J. Joubert & Tamera P. Lee, Empowering Your Institution Through Assessment, 95 J. MED. LIBR. ASS’N 46 (2007) []; and the committee’s 2008 annual report [].

LCSH in SKOS: Implications for Digital Law Libraries

Following up on our earlier post respecting Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) marked up in SKOS [URL corrected 10 August 2011], this post suggests the implications of LCSH in SKOS for free or low-cost digital law libraries and aggregators of metadata harvested from such libraries.

In a recent discussion of Tom Bruce’s very interesting post respecting the requirements of a public legal information system, subject indexing of primary and secondary legal resources was identified as a necessary feature of a digital law library. One marked difference between sophisticated commercial computer-assisted legal research (CALR) services, such as Westlaw and Lexis.com, on the one hand; and free or low-cost CALR services, such as those furnished by the legal information institutes (LIIs) or other providers, such as those listed on Georgetown Law Library’s Free & Low-Cost Legal Research page, or those listed on our digital law libraries page, on the other hand; is that the sophisticated commercial services provide high-quality subject indexing to primary law, featuring controlled subject vocabularies, such as Lexis.com’s Legal Topics and West’s Key Number System. Moreover, Westlaw and Lexis.com appear to have rendered their controlled subject vocabularies machine-readable, so as to enable certain kinds of automated subject search and retrieval of primary law. Machine-readable controlled vocabulary subject indexing substantially improves recall and precision and results in substantial time savings to the user, and so appears to be a critical aspect of the value added to legal information by the sophisticated CALR vendors.

The release of LCSH in SKOS raises the prospect that the LIIs and other free or low-cost CALR services can similarly enhance the value of their primary and secondary law collections. LCSH in SKOS is a public-domain, machine-readable, controlled subject vocabulary containing a very rich set of thousands of legal terms pertaining to a diversity of legal traditions and systems (including common law & civil law systems and the system of public international law) and thousands of cross references to unauthorized and related terms. When matched with automated subject indexing tools (see, e.g., here and here) LCSH in SKOS could allow free or low-cost digital law libraries to provide sophisticated subject access to their collections at an affordable expense. The free services could even collaborate on such indexing, and so realize further efficiencies. Moreover, the same controlled vocabulary can be used for primary and for secondary legal resources, enabling cross-database searching and providing substantial time and cost savings to users. Further, LCSH in SKOS can be linked to controlled subject vocabularies or ontologies in other languages (e.g., perhaps eventually through the Virtual International Authority File), to facilitate multi-lingual controlled vocabulary subject search and retrieval in digital law libraries.

In addition, LCSH in SKOS could enhance subject access to legal information across multiple services. To the extent that LCSH in SKOS is integrated into descriptive metadata for individual legal resources (for an interesting recent primary-law example, see MODS files for the Federal Register on FEDSYS, click on “More”), in OAI-PMH compliant databases, and such metadata is harvested and made publicly available, LCSH in SKOS could facilitate controlled-vocabulary subject retrieval of legal resources across multiple digital law libraries.

Public availability of LCSH in SKOS thus potentially represents a major breakthrough in improved intellectual access to law for users of free or low-cost digital law libraries.

Legal Scholarship & the New Media

Legal scholarship is an important context for legal informatics. Indeed, the legal scholarly communications system is an elaborate and significant legal information system. That system is being changed by the new Internet media, though the nature and extent of that change are the subjects of debate and research.

In response to an interesting discussion on the LIBLICENSE listserv of Prof. Wardrip-Fruin’s Blog-Based Peer Review: Four Surprises and discussion of that article on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog, and particularly the question of whether the new Internet media are having any substantial effect on scholarship, I wrote the following, which may be of interest to legal informaticists:

I think that one significant change in scholarly work flow [as noted by Anthony Watkinson] is the dissemination of scholarly ideas and resources through informal genres such as preprints and preprint services (such as RePEc [& SSRN]), microblogs (like Twitter), blogs, listservs, social network tools like Mendeley, certain datasets, and podcasts, which allow for informal peer review and peer commentary throughout the entire lifecycle of a scholarly project. Often these communications express scholarly ideas at a much earlier stage in the scholarly work process than previously enabled by colloquia and conference papers.

Further, because the audience for these new media is much greater than the audience for traditional media, scholars using the new media can receive much more input much earlier in the scholarly process. The new media thus enable the integration of “crowdsourcing” into the scholarly process in many disciplines.

Relatedly, the new media and communications networks make possible long-distance collaboration as never before, and permit an in-progress scholarly project to incorporate new ideas and new personnel (e.g., to morph from a one-person, two-concept, single-disciplinary project, to a four-person, seven-concept, multi-disciplinary project) in a very short time, again in a manner not possible using traditional media.

Moreover, often the dissemination of ideas in these new media becomes an end in itself: for example, many an influential scholarly blog post never leads to a formally published scholarly work. Finally, in recognition of the scholarly value of these informal new media communications, there are efforts in many disciplines[, including law,] to grant faculty credit towards tenure or post-tenure review for work disseminated via these new media.

For perspectives from the legal community, see, e.g., Stephanie L. Plotin, Legal Scholarship, Electronic Publishing, and Open Access: Transformation or Steadfast Stagnation?, 101 LAW LIBR. J. 31 (2009), also available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1350138; J. Robert Brown, Jr., Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings (Univ. of Denver Sturm Coll. of Law Legal Research Paper Series No. 08-04, 2008), text available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1094806, appx. available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1096606; Paul Horwitz, “Evaluate Me!”: Conflicted Thoughts on Gatekeeping in Legal Scholarship’s New Age, CONNtemplations, May 2007, available at http://www.conntemplations.org/index.php?entry=entry070503-120000, preprint available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=982401; Jan Ryan Novak & Leslie A. Pardo, The Evolving Nature of Faculty Publications, 26 LEGAL REFERENCE SERVICES Q. 209 (2007) (Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Research Paper No. 07-134, 2007), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=961879; J. Robert Brown, Jr., Blogs, Law School Rankings, and “The Race to the Bottom” (Univ. of Denver Sturm Coll. of Law Legal Research Paper Series No. 07-33, 2007), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1003425; Nancy Levit, Scholarship Advice for New Law Professors in the Electronic Age, 16 WIDENER L.J. 947 (2007), preprint available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=939007; Jack M. Balkin, Online Legal Scholarship: The Medium and the Message, 116 YALE L.J. POCKET PART 20 (2006), available at http://j.mp/b7ySGt; James G. Milles, Redefining Open Access for the Legal Information Market, 98 LAW LIBR. J. 619, 635 (2006), also available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=940789; Lawrence B. Solum, Download It While It’s Hot: Open Access and Legal Scholarship, 10 LEWIS & CLARK L. REV. 841, 860–61 (2006), also available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=957237; Symposium, Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship, 84 WASH. U.L. REV. No. 2 (2006), also available at http://lawreview.wustl.edu/inprint/84-5/.

[This post was last updated 11 June 2010.]

Call for Papers: JURISIN 2009

A call for papers, deadline September 14, 2009, has been issued for JURISIN 2009, the Third International Workshop on Juris-informatics, to be held in Tokyo, Japan, November 19-20, 2009. Topics include:

• Legal reasoning
• Argumentation/Argumentation agent
• Legal term ontology
• Formal / Intelligent management of legal knowledge-base
• Translation of legal documents
• Computer-aided law education
• Use of Informatics and AI in law
• Legal issues on ubiquitous computing/multi-agent system/the Internet
• Social implications of use of informatics and AI in law

HT to IAAIL.

Atzmüller & Landl on Patent Metadata

Peter Atzmüller & Gerald Landl of voestalpine Stahl GmbH have published Semantic Enrichment and Added Metadata: Examples of Efficient Usage in an Industrial Environment, 31 World Patent Information 89 (2009) (subscription required; outline is viewable without subscription). Here is the abstract:

“The need for more comprehensive and ‘easy to use’ search tools especially for patent documents still exists. In this paper, the developments of the ongoing project of voestalpine Stahl GmbH together with their partners regarding the implementation of a semantic search tool and an appropriate visualisation are revealed.

“The main focus is on the different methods of analysis and examples of applications of the software. The features are on the one hand, a semantic representation of the content of the patent documents, in combination with the user’s feedback and the use of landscape visualisation during the retrieval process. On the other hand a satisfactory quality is ensured by using among other features a document corpus which is finite and focused on the technology areas of voestalpine.”

HT Erika Wayne

Jones, IT Forensics: 22 Years On

Nigel Jones, of University College Dublin, has published IT Forensics: 22 Years On, 2 International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics 116 (2009), full text here (subscription required), abstract and keywords here. Here is the abstract:

“This paper examines the progress made in the area of ‘digital forensics’ and ‘cybercrime investigation’ since the author’s first involvement in the subject in 1986. At that time, hard disk technology was in its relative infancy and examination of computer-based evidence and its inclusion in criminal proceedings very limited. There were no standards for dealing with electronic data within the criminal justice system and no training or qualifications available for those involved in its handling, particularly those in the law enforcement community who were in most instances acting as ‘first responders’. The ensuing 22 years have seen tremendous advances in technology that have not been met with similar advances in the standards for the handling and presentation of electronic evidence that would give assurance to those in the criminal justice system. This paper examines what has happened since 1986 and identifies issues still to be resolved.”