Abstracts: Bayesian Analysis in Law: Papers presented at Conference: The Many Faces of Contemporary Philosophy and Theory of Law

Abstracts have been posted of papers presented at the Conference: The Many Faces of Contemporary Philosophy and Theory of Law, held 23-24 March 2013, at Jagellonian University, Cracow, Poland. The conference included a special working group on Bayesian analysis in law, abstracts of papers of which begin on page 6 of the abstracts volume and are excerpted below:

Dr Jeroen Keppens: Bayesian Perspectives on the Value of Evidence. Abstract:

Given the interdisciplinary audience, I would like to introduce the Bayesian approach to evidential reasoning in Law. Then I plan to move on the Bayesian modeling techniques and the various concerns and difficulties that arise from it.

Paweł Banaś and Krzysztof Kasparek: Some remarks about controversies concerning applying Bayes theorem to criminal policy-making. Abstract:

The following paper aims at summarizing a discussion concerning the exploitation of Baysesian analysis within criminal policy-making, namely problems with the so called postprison civil commitment of sex offenders as sexually violent predators (SVPs) employed currently in some of the US states. During this process it is determined whether a former convict will be “classified” as SVP. Typically, actuarial instruments are used in order to help decide on this issue. Recently, Richard Wollert has pointed out that exploitation of Bayesian theorem may prove useful in this type of cases when addressing at least some of the questions that may arise. However, his ideas were met with much criticism within risk-assessment community. In this paper we want to present main arguments of both sides of the debate and point to some of the possible problems with Bayesian analysis as used in forensic psychology.

Piotr Bystranowski: Czy da się nauczyć prawników statystyki? Sieci bayesowskie a unikanie błędów probabilistycznych w rozumowaniach prawniczych. Abstract:

Od lat siedemdziesiątych i czasów przełomowych eksperymentów Kahnemana i Tversky’ego powszechnym stało się przekonanie, iż ludzkie osądy w warunkach niepewności często dają rezultaty systematycznie i rażąco niezgodne z regułami matematycznego rachunku prawdopodobieństwa, w tym zwłaszcza z tzw. wzorem Bayesa. Od błędów tego rodzaju nie jest wolna sala sądowa. Przeciwnie – wyniki szeregu procesów karnych pokazują, że wymiar sprawiedliwości jest podatny na wiele błędów w rozumowaniach probabilistycznych (z tzw. złudzeniem prokuratora na czele). Ich skutkiem bywa, na przykład, przypisanie zbyt dużej pewności materiałowi dowodowemu, który z formalnego punktu widzenia zdaje się być dalece nierozstrzygający. Pociąga to za sobą pytanie, w jaki sposób rozwiązać ową ewidentną niezgodność mię-dzy intuicyjnymi rozumowaniami w warunkach niepewności a formalnymi metodami probabilistycznymi. [...] Tych mankamentów zdaje się unikać proponowana przez Normana Fentona i Martina Neila wizualizacja przy pomocy sieci bayesowskich. W ten sposób można modelować nawet najbardziej skomplikowany materiał dowodowy w sposób przejrzysty dla laika. Rola stron procesu ograniczałaby się tu do sprecyzowania prawdopodobieństw a priori i zależności między poszczególnymi zmiennymi, zaś zadanie skonstruowania architektury sieci pozostawiano by ekspertom. O prawomocności obliczeń dokonywanych „pod spodem” można by przekonać strony na prostych przykładach, z wykorzystaniem np. drzewek zdarzeniowych. Zatem zastosowanie sieci bayesowskich w procesie miałoby być, zdaniem Fentona i Neila, najprostszym sposobem uniknięcia błędów probabilistycznych bez konieczności podejmowania beznadziejnego zadania, jakim jest nauczenie prawników statystyki.

Bartosz Janik: Some remarks concerning Bayesian rationality in Law. Abstract:

This paper aims at providing some remarks concerning Bayesian decision theory (BDT) and rationality in the legal perspective. As a first point I would like to provide a philosophical account of rationality and I will try to, while focusing on most appropriate meaning of it, to judge it from a legal point of view. It will be clear that the general notion of legal rationality is very complicated and we must set some particular goals to achieve a more global perspective. In my paper, I will focus on legal reasoning and will try to adopt Rescher’s distinction of cognitive/practical/evaluative rationality for the purpose of this analysis. The main point of this part will be the evaluation, to what extent risk aversion is connected with rationality. The thesis will be formulated in the following manner: the mechanisms of risk avoidance could serve as local rationality–triggers (as to oppose skepticism in Rescher’s terminology and deal with imperfection of our cognitive resources). The second point will be the attempt to show the connection between Bayesian decision theory (which focuses on error minimizing and thus, risk avoidance) and rationality. I will introduce basic formalism of BDT and show how, on that basis, we could formulate the local rationality for legal decision making. Again, the central notion will be the risk and I will present formal mechanism of risk avoidance in BDT. The notion of rationality, as a risk optimizer, will be proposed for this local environment. The last point of the analysis will be the answer to the question to what extent we are free from legal–theoretic assumptions in formulations of rationality. It turns out that the choice of an underlying theory of law will always determine our global notion of rationality but in the local perspective we could formulate general tools and concepts.

Izabela Skoczeń: Why should a lawyer calculate the probability of implicature formation? Abstract:

This paper aims at providing examples of possible applications of methods for calculating the probability of implicature formation (with the use of the bayesian method) in legal situations. The basis for the present considerations will be the notion of scalar implicatures, based on the gricean approach to Pragmatics. Scalars are based on conventional meanings attributed to words with the use of lexical scales (Horn). Placing a word in a definite position in a scale enables the speakers to attribute it a definite meaning, that does not have to be consistent with the lexical meaning that would be understood with the use of classical logic. [...] As experiments have proven, in contexts with data deficit the probability of definite implicature formation is rather not intuitive. A quite striking example is the following situation: if while describing three objects, the speakers has information concerning the features of only two of them, the hearer seems more prone to infer, that the third item disposes of the same feature while hearing an utterance with the numeral “two”, rather than “some”. This surprising result seems most vital for lawyers, as it conveys a hidden pattern of linguistic manipulation. The conventional implicature that should be cancelled due to pragmatic reasons is so strong, that it still influences the meaning. Imagine, that we have three suspects A,B,C and we know that A and B were at the crime scene that day. We don’t know, whether C was at the crime scene. If the probability of omitting scalar implicature cancellation is higher when using expressions like some, rather than numerals, C’s defendant should rather say “Some of the suspects were at the crime scene.” rather than “Two were at the crime scene.”. The later formulation, according to Goodman and Stuhlm¨uller calculations, would boost the probability of the court inferring the implicature that C was also at the crime scene that day. This observation opens an entire new range of possibilities of manipulating implicature formation in contexts, where the hearer is aware of the speaker’s data being insufficient. It is often the in judicial environments, when the provided evidence is too scarce.

For full text of the papers, please contact the authors.

HT Bartosz Janik

Scherer et al.: Bridging narrative scenario texts and formal policy modeling through conceptual policy modeling

Sabrina Scherer, Professor Dr. Maria A. Wimmer, and Suvad Markisic, all of the University of Koblenz-Landau Institute for IS Research, have published Bridging narrative scenario texts and formal policy modeling through conceptual policy modeling, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

Engaging stakeholders in policy making and supporting policy development with advanced information and communication technologies including policy simulation is currently high on the agenda of research. In order to involve stakeholders in providing their input to policy modeling via online means, simple techniques need to be employed such as scenario technique. Scenarios enable stakeholders to express their views in narrative text. At the other end of policy development, a frequently used approach to policy modeling is agent-based simulation. So far, effective support to transform narrative text input to formal simulation statements is not widely available. In this paper, we present a novel approach to support the transformation of narrative texts via conceptual modeling into formal simulation models. The approach also stores provenance information which is conveyed via annotations of texts to the conceptual model and further on to the simulation model. This way, traceability of information is provided, which contributes to better understanding and transparency, and therewith enables stakeholders and policy modelers to return to the sources that informed the conceptual and simulation model. In this paper, we present the consistent conceptual description (CCD) as conceptual modeling approach to bridge the gap between narrative texts and formal policy models. The CCD meta-model with the underlying vocabulary for describing policy contexts is detailed. A case study introduces the application of the approach in the Open Collaboration for Policy Modeling project.

Accepted papers: ICAIL 2013

The list of accepted papers, research abstracts, and demos has been posted for ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, to be held 10-14 June 2013 in Rome.

Here is the list:

Papers

• Trevor Bench-Capon, Henry Prakken, Zachary Wyner Ada , Katie Atkinson: Argument schemes for Reasoning with Legal Cases Using Values
• Guido Boella, Marijn Janssen, Joris Hulstijn, Llio Humphreys, Leendert van der Torre: Managing Legal Interpretation in Regulatory Compliance
• Isabella Distinto, Nicola Guarino, Claudio Masolo: A well-founded ontological framework for modeling personal income tax
• Davide Gianfelice, Leonardo Lesmo, Monica Palmirani, Daniele Perlo, Daniele P. Radicioni: Modificatory Provisions Detection: a Hybrid NLP Approach
• Laura Giordano, Alberto Martelli, Daniele Theseider Dupré: Temporal Deontic Action Logic for the Verification of Compliance to Norms in ASP
• Guido Governatori, Francesco Olivieri, Antonino Rotolo, Simone Scannapieco: Legal Contractions: A Logical Analysis
• Guido Governatori, Monica Palmirani, Tara Athan, Harold Boley, Adrian Paschke, Adam Wyner: LegalRuleML
• Matthias Grabmair, Kevin D. Ashley: Using Event Progression to Enhance Purposive Argumentation in the Value Judgment Formalism
• Marc Lauritsen: On Balance
• Antonio Mastropaolo, Francesco Pallante, Daniele P. Radicioni: Legal Documents Categorization by Compression
• Antonino Rotolo, Serena Villata, Fabien Gandon: A Deontic Logic Semantics for Licenses Composition in the Web of Data
• Zaher Salah, Frans Coenen, Davide Grossi: Extracting Debate Graphs from Parliamentary Transcripts: A Study Directed at UK House of Commons Debates
• Mihai Surdeanu, Sara Jeruss: Identifying Patent Monetization Entities
• Tran Thi Oanh, Nguyen Le Minh,Akira Shimazu: Reference Resolution in Legal Texts
• Marc van Opijnen: A Model for Automated Rating of Case Law
• Charlotte S. Vlek, Henry Prakken, Silja Renooij, Bart Verheij: Modeling Crime Scenarios in a Bayesian Network
• Tomasz Zurek, Michał Araszkiewicz: Modeling teleological interpretation

Research Abstracts

• Michał Araszkiewicz, Agata Łopatkiewicz, Adam Zienkiewicz: Factor-Based Parent Plan Support System
• Kevin D. Ashley, Vern R. Walker: Automated Monitoring of Legal-Rule Compliance Using DeepQA NLP Tools: Screening Legal Documents for Argumentation Evidence
• Michal Chalamish, Moshe Hazoom, Uri J. Schild: Semi-Automatic Creation of Wigmore Diagrams
• Jack G. Conrad, John Zeleznikow: The Significance of Evaluation in AI and Law: A Case Study Re-examining ICAIL Proceedings
• Michael Curtotti, Eric McCreath, Srinivas Sridharan: Software Tools for the Visualization of Definition Networks in Legal Contracts
• Tingting Li, Tina Balke, Marina De Vos, Julian Padget, Ken Satoh: A Model-based Approach to the Automatic Revision of Secondary Legislation
• Doris Liebwald: Vagueness in Law. A Stimulus for ‘Artificial Intelligence & Law’
• Nada Mimouni, Meritxell Fernandez-Barrera, Adeline Nazarenko, Daniele Bourcier, Sylvie Salotti: A Relational Approach for Information Retrieval on XML Legal Sources
• Katsumi Nitta, Shumpei Kubosawa, Kei Nishina, Masaki Sugimoto, Shogo Okada: A Discussion Training Support System and Its Evaluation
• Gordon J. Pace, Fernando Schapachnik: Synthesising Implicit Contracts
• Anna Ronkainen: Intelligent Trademark Analysis: Experiments in Large-Scale Evaluation of Real-World Legal AI
• Antonino Rotolo, Regis Riveret, Didac Busquets, Giuseppe Contissa, Giovanni Sartor: Vicarious Reinforcement and Ex Ante Law Enforcement: A Study in Norm-Governed Learning Agents
• Ted Sichelman: The Mathematical Structure of Legal Rights
• Radboud Winkels, Jochem Douw, Sara Veldhoen: Experiments in Automated Support for Argument Reconstruction

Demo Abstracts

Guido Boella, Luigi Di Caro, Daniele Rispoli, Livio Robaldo: A System for Classifying Multi-label Text into EuroVoc

Thomas Gordon: Introducing the Carneades Web Application

Guido Governatori, Sidney Shek: Business Process Compliance Checker

Luc Ferrand, Isabelle Pesquié-Geday: Hammurabi, the legal expert assistant platform for the French Judge: How to deliver up to date knowledge of national and European laws and regulations in front of rapid expansion of legal information and decisions, with an automated software assistant

Jop Hofste, Hans Henseler, Maurice van Keulen: Computer assisted extraction, merging and correlation of identities

Adam Zachary Wyner, Maya Wardeh, Katie Atkinson, Trevor Bench-Capon: Argumentation Based Tools for Policy-Making

In addition, registration for ICAIL 2013 is now open.

HT Anne Gardner and @francesconi_e

Legal informatics papers at We Robot 2013 Conference

Some legal informatics papers or panels are included in the program for the 2013 We Robot Conference, to be held 8-9 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, in Stanford, California, USA:

Panel: Law as Algorithm
Speakers: Peter Asaro, Lisa Shay, Woodrow Hartzog
Moderator: Harry Surden
Related Papers:
On Implicit and Explicit Legal Requirements for Human Judgment
Do Robots Dream of Electric Laws? An Experiment in Law as Algorithm
[...]

Panel: Designing Values
Speakers: Ergun Calisgan, AJung Moon, Aneta Podsiadla
Moderator: Ian Kerr
Related Papers:
Open Roboethics Pilot: Accelerating Policy Design, Implementation and Demonstration of Socially Acceptable Robot Behaviors
What Robotics Can Learn from the Contemporary Problems of Information Technologies Sector- Compliance and Enforcement of Privacy by Design
[...]

Paper: Programming Robotic Decisions with Potentially Lethal Outcomes: Comparing Self-Driving Cars and Autonomous Weapon Systems, and How They Should Be Regulated as Their Autonomous Capabilities Evolve
Authors: Kenneth Anderson, Matthew Waxman
Commentator: Dan Siciliano (Stanford University Rock Center)

HT @LawandLit

Carey on Modeling Contradictions in Judicial Precedent

Matthew Carey, Esq., of Thomson Reuters has published Holdings about holdings: Modeling contradictions in judicial precedent, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Click here for a preprint of the article.

Here is the abstract:

This paper attempts to formalize the differences between two methods of analysis used by judicial opinions in common law jurisdictions to contradict holdings posited by earlier opinions: “disagreeing” with the holdings of the earlier opinions and “attributing” holdings to the prior opinions. The paper will demonstrate that it is necessary to model both methods of analysis differently to generate an accurate picture of the state of legal authority in hypothetical examples, as well as in an example based on Barry Friedman’s analysis of the “stealth overruling” of Miranda v. Arizona through subsequent judicial interpretations. Because the question of whether “disagreement” and “attribution” need to be modeled separately relates to contradictions rather than to subtler interactions between holdings such as “distinguishing,” it can be answered using the simple technique of modeling holdings as propositional variables and evaluating the holdings using truth tables.

Call for Papers: Special issue of AI & Law on Computational Methods for Enforcing Privacy and Fairness

Dr. Thomas F. Gordon of Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communications Systems (FOKUS) tells us that a call for papers has been issued for a special issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law on the topic, “Computational Methods for Enforcing Privacy and Fairness in the Knowledge Society”.

The submission deadline is 15 April 2013.

Here is an excerpt from the call:

We invite contributions on methodologies, techniques, algorithms, and tools in support of the analysis or of the enforcement of privacy, non-discrimination, and other personal rights in ICT systems for the knowledge society. Special focus is on multi-disciplinary approaches on the following, non-exhaustive, list of topics, and that relate to Artificial Intelligence and Law:

• Methods for enforcing data privacy and anonymity
• Methods for data portability, and for the right to oblivion
• Methods for data protection and law enforcement
• Privacy by-design in intelligent systems
• Privacy-preserving data mining
• Privacy policies in social networks
• Context-aware location privacy
• Methods for unbiased data collection and processing
• Methods for enforcing fairness in profiling and targeting
• Methods for discrimination discovery from data
• Statistical measures of discrimination
• Methods for discrimination prevention in data mining
• Computational argumentation in discrimination analysis
• Design of (quasi-)experimental methods
• Computational models of segregation in social networks
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Tools and systems, with case studies [...]

For more details, please see the complete call.

HT Tom Gordon

Ossowski (ed.): Agreement Technologies

Springer has published an article collection entitled Agreement Technologies (2013), edited by Professor Dr. Sascha Ossowski of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.

The book is volume 8 in the the Law, Governance and Technology Series.

Here are excerpts from the preface:

This book describes the state of the art in the emerging field of Agreement Technologies (AT). AT refer to computer systems in which autonomous software agents negotiate with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to come to mutually acceptable agreements. [...]

The book was produced in the framework of [the EU-funded] COST Action IC0801 on Agreement Technologies.

This book [...] is subdivided into seven parts.

• Part I is dedicated to foundational issues of Agreement Technologies, examining the notion of agreement and agreement processes from different perspectives. [...]
• Part II outlines the relevance of novel approaches to Semantics and ontological alignments in distributed settings.
• Part III gives an overview of approaches for modelling norms and normative systems, the simulation of their dynamics, and their
  impact on the other key areas of Agreement Technologies.
• Part IV discusses how to design computational organisations, how to reason about them, and how organisational models can be evolved.
• Part V gives an overview of current approaches to argumentation and negotiation, and how they can be used to inform human reasoning, as well as to assist machine reasoning.
• Part VI describes different models and mechanisms of trust and reputation, and discusses their relevance for the other key areas of Agreement Technologies. [...]
• Part VII provides examples of how the techniques outlined in the previous parts of the book can be used to build distributed software applications that solve real-world problems.

Please notice that the parts are supported by a set of video-lectures that can be freely downloaded from the web.

Fornaciari and Poesio on Automatic deception detection in Italian court cases

Tommaso Fornaciari of the University of Trento, and Professor Dr. Massimo Poesio of the University of Essex, have published Automatic deception detection in Italian court cases, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

Effective methods for evaluating the reliability of statements issued by witnesses and defendants in hearings would be an extremely valuable support to decision-making in court and other legal settings. In recent years, methods relying on stylometric techniques have proven most successful for this task; but few such methods have been tested with language collected in real-life situations of high-stakes deception, and therefore their usefulness outside lab conditions still has to be properly assessed. In this study we report the results obtained by using stylometric techniques to identify deceptive statements in a corpus of hearings collected in Italian courts. The defendants at these hearings were condemned for calumny or false testimony, so the falsity of (some of) their statements is fairly certain. In our experiments we replicated the methods used in previous studies but never before applied to high-stakes data, and tested new methods. We also considered the effect of a number of variables including in particular the homogeneity of the dataset. Our results suggest that accuracy at deception detection clearly above chance level can be obtained with real-life data as well.

Surden on Computable Contracts

Professor Harry Surden of the University of Colorado Law School has published Computable Contracts, UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 46, pp. 629-700 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

It is possible to formulate contractual obligations so that computers can “understand” and make prima-facie compliance assessments with specified terms and conditions. Such a contractual obligation, formulated specifically for computer processability, is what this Article terms a “computable contract.” Computable contracts are not merely theoretical, but instead are increasingly being used in economically significant domains. Certain widely used financial contracts exemplify this model. The emergence of computable contracts has largely been unrecognized in the legal literature. However, computable contracting is not extensible across all, or even most, contracting scenarios. Rather, it is limited to a small subset of contracting scenarios involving standardization, and relative legal and factual certainty.

Drawing upon computer science research, this Article provides a theoretical account of computable contracting. It first explains how firms can communicate contracting information to computers by representing contracts as data instead of (or in addition to) the traditional written language form. Formalizing contractual obligations in this way is what is termed “data-oriented” contracting. The representation of contractual obligations as data, in turn, allows for novel contracting properties. For example, parties can effectively “translate” certain contractual criteria into a comparable set of computer-processable rules. To make contracts “computable”, parties provide computer systems with external data that is relevant to performance. This model is supported by contemporary examples of computable contracts in domains ranging from finance to intellectual property. This Article also provides principles for distinguishing contracting scenarios that are amenable to computability from those that are not.

Click here for video (in QuickTime format, .mov) of Professor Surden’s presentation of this article at Stanford Law School, October 2011.

Click here for the abstract of Professor Surden’s presentation of this article at Stanford Law School, October 2011.

Kahana on research in artificial intelligence and law

Eran Kahana, Esq., of Stanford CodeX: Center for Legal Informatics, was recently interviewed about his research on artificial intelligence and law, by David Levine for the Stanford Center for Internet and Society’s Hearsay Culture radio program.

Click here for the podcast of the program.

Click here for Eran’s posts about his research, at the Stanford CodeX Blog.

HT Eran Kahana