Wyner on Psychology and Policy Modeling

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science has posted Psychological Studies of Policy Reasoning, at his blog, Language, Logic, Law, Software.

Excerpts:

The New York Times had an article on the difficulties that the public has to understand complex policy proposals – I’m Right (For Some Reason). The points in the article relate directly to the research I’ve been doing at Liverpool on the IMPACT Project, for we decompose a policy proposal into its constituent parts for examination and improved understanding. See our tool live: Structured Consultation Tool
[...]
Breaking down policy proposals into component parts for further investigation and understanding is exactly what we’ve been doing in the IMPACT Project.

Wyner et al.: An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Laws

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and colleagues, will present a paper entitled An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Laws, at JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 17-19 December 2012 at the Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

Here is the abstract:

To make legal texts machine processable, the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translated to formal representations that can be automatically reasoned with. The paper considers the latter, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a form that can be reasoned with by a computer, sentences must be parsed and formally represented. The paper presents the state-of-the-art in automatic translation of law to a machine readable formal representation, provides corpora, outlines some key problems, and proposes tasks to address the problems.

This paper was produced as part of Project IMPACT.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

Wyner, Bench-Capon, et al.: A Model-Based Critique Tool for Policy Deliberation

Dr. Adam Wyner, Professor Dr. Trevor Bench-Capon, and colleagues, all of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, will present a paper entitled A Model-Based Critique Tool for Policy Deliberation, at JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 17-19 December 2012 at the Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

Here is the abstract:

Domain models have proven useful as the basis for the construction and evaluation of arguments to support deliberation about policy proposals. Using a model provides the means to systematically examine and understand the fine-grained objections that individuals might have about the policy. While in previous approaches, a justification for a policy proposal is presented for critique by the user, here, we reuse the domain model to invert the roles of the citizen and the government: a policy proposal is elicited from the citizen, and a software agent automatically and systematically critiques it relative to the model and the government’s point of view. Such an approach engages citizens in a critical dialogue about the policy actions, which may lead to a better understanding of the implications of their proposals and that of the government. A web-based tool that interactively leads users through the critique is presented.

This paper was produced as part of Project IMPACT.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

Bench-Capon et al.: A History of AI and Law in 50 Papers: 25 Years of ICAIL

Professor Dr. Trevor Bench-Capon the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and colleagues, have published A history of AI and Law in 50 papers: 25 years of the international conference on AI and Law, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

We provide a retrospective of 25 years of the International Conference on AI and Law, which was first held in 1987. Fifty papers have been selected from the thirteen conferences and each of them is described in a short subsection individually written by one of the 24 authors. These subsections attempt to place the paper discussed in the context of the development of AI and Law, while often offering some personal reactions and reflections. As a whole, the subsections build into a history of the last quarter century of the field, and provide some insights into where it has come from, where it is now, and where it might go.

Three of Adam Wyner‘s contributions to this issue are linked from the post: Wyner on Logic Programming, Case Law Knowledge Bases, and Legal Case-Based Reasoning and Information Retrieval.

Wyner, Atkinson & Bench-Capon: Model Based Critique of Policy Proposals

Dr. Adam Wyner, Dr. Katie Atkinson, and Professor Dr. Trevor J. M. Bench-Capon, all of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, will present a paper entitled Model Based Critique of Policy Proposals, at ePart 2012: The Fourth international conference on eParticipation, on 5 September 2012, in Kristiansand, Norway.

Here is the abstract:

Citizens may engage with policy issues both to critique official justifications, and to make their own proposals and receive reasons why they are not favoured. Either direction of use can be supported by argumentation schemes based on formal models, which can be used to verify and generate arguments, assimilate objections etc. Previously we have explored the citizen critiquing a justification using an argumentation scheme based on Alternating Action-based Transition Systems. We now present a system which uses the same model to critique proposals from citizens. A prototype has been implemented in Prolog and we illustrate the ideas with code fragments and a running example.

The example discussed in the paper deals with legal compliance.

Wyner on Logic Programming, Case Law Knowledge Bases, and Legal Case-Based Reasoning and Information Retrieval

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science has posted comments on three papers presented at the first ICAIL conference, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (1987). These comments are to be published in a forthcoming special issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here are links to the comments:

• Adam Wyner: Comment on Trevor Bench-Capon et al. (1987). Logic programming for large scale applications in law: A formalisation of supplementary benefit legislation.
• Adam Wyner: Comment on Carole Hafner. (1987). Conceptual organization of case law knowledge bases.
• Adam Wyner: Comment on Edwina Rissland and Jody Daniels. (1987). A hybrid CBR-IR approach to legal information retrieval.

Wyner on Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science has published Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 39-41.

Here is the abstract:

Legislation and regulations are expressed in natural language. Machine-readable forms of the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translation to a logic. The paper considers the latter form, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a machine-readable logic, sentences must be parsed and semantically translated. Manual translation is time and labour intensive, usually involving narrowly scoping the rules. While automated translation systems have made significant progress, problems remain. The paper outlines systems to automatically translate legislative clauses to a semantic representation, highlighting key problems and proposing some tasks to address them.

Wyner and Peters on Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science and Dr. Wim Peters of the University of Sheffield Department of Computer Science, have published Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 34-36.

Here is the abstract:

Large corpora of legal texts are increasing available in the public domain. To make them amenable for automated text processing, various sorts of annotations must be added. We consider semantic annotations bearing on the content of the texts – legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. Adding annotations and developing gold standard corpora (to verify rule-based or machine learning algorithms) is costly in terms of time, expertise, and cost. To make the processes efficient, we propose several instances of GATE’s Teamware to support annotation tasks for legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. We engage annotation volunteers (law school students and legal professionals). The reports on the tasks are to be presented at the workshop.

For more information, please see Dr. Wyner’s post, Crowdsourced Legal Case Annotation.

Papers Available for SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts

Full text papers have been posted for SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, being held 27 May 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Here is the list of papers:

• Giulia Venturi: Design and Development of TEMIS: a Syntactically and Semantically Annotated Corpus of Italian Legislative Texts
• Guido Boella, Luigi Di Caro, Llio Humphreys, Livio Robaldo: Using Legal Ontology to Improve Classification in the Eunomos Legal Document and Knowledge Management System
• Antonio Lazari, Mª Ángeles Zarco-Tejada: JurWordNet and FrameNet Approaches to Meaning Representation: a Legal Case Study
• Lorenzo Bacci, Enrico Francesconi, Maria Teresa Sagri: A Rule-based Parsing Approach for Detecting Case Law References in Italian Court Decisions
• Adam Wyner, Wim Peters: Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware
• Paulo Quaresma: Legal Information Extraction ← Machine Learning Algorithms + Linguistic Information
• Adam Wyner: Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts
• Felice Dell’Orletta, Simone Marchi, Simonetta Montemagni, Barbara Plank, Giulia Venturi: The SPLeT–2012 Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts
• Giuseppe Attardi, Daniele Sartiano and Maria Simi: Active Learning for Domain Adaptation of Dependency Parsing on Legal Texts
• Alessandro Mazzei, Cristina Bosco: Simple Parser Combination
• Niklas Nisbeth, Anders Søgaard: Parser combination under sample bias

Wyner and Peters Invite Participation in Crowdsourced Legal Case Annotation Project

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science and Dr. Wim Peters of the University of Sheffield Department of Computer Science, have posted Crowdsourced Legal Case Annotation, at Dr. Wyner’s blog, Language Logic Law Software.

Here is a summary of the post:

This is an academic research study on legal informatics (information processing of the law). The study uses an online, collaborative tool to crowdsource the annotation of legal cases. The task is similar to legal professionals’ annotation of cases. The result will be a public corpus of searchable, richly annotated legal cases that can be further processed, analysed, or queried for conceptual annotations.

Adam and Wim are computer scientists who are interested in language, law, and the Internet.

We are inviting people to participate in this collaborative task. This is a beta version of the exercise, and we welcome comments on how to improve it. Please read through this blog post, look at the video, and get in contact.

For more information, please see the complete post.