Call for Papers: ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law

A call for papers — with paper submission deadline of 18 January 2013 — has been issued for ICAIL 2013: 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, to be held 10-14 June 2013 in Rome, Italy.

The Twitter account for the conference is @ICAIL2013 . The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #ICAIL2013. The conference organizers invite those interested to follow the Twitter account and hashtag and to comment and contribute with the latest news.

The conference features two tracks: one for “regular papers” and one for “innovative applications papers.”

Here is the complete list of deadlines:

• Mentoring program request deadline: November 9, 2012
• Mentoring program paper deadline: November 16, 2012
• Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 7, 2012
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 11, 2013
• Submission of papers deadline: January 18, 2013
• Notification of acceptance: March 20, 2013
• Final revised and formatted papers due: April 19, 2013
• Conference: June 10 – June 14, 2013

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Formal and computational models of legal reasoning
• Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining
• Computational models of argumentation and decision making
• Legal knowledge representation including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge
• Automatic legal text classification and summarization
• Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
• Machine learning and data mining applied to legal databases
• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
• E-discovery and e-disclosure
• E-government and e-justice
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
• Modeling negotiation and contract formation
• Computational models of case-based legal reasoning
• Online dispute resolution
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Anne Gardner

[NOTE: Updated 23 November 2012 to add the Twitter account and hashtag. HT Enrico Francesconi]

Boella et al. on Using Legal Ontology to Improve Classification in the Eunomos Legal Document and Knowledge Management System

Professor Dr. Guido Boella of Università degli Studi di Torino Dipartimento di Informatica, and colleagues, have published Using Legal Ontology to Improve Classification in the Eunomos Legal Document and Knowledge Management System, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 13-20.

Here is the abstract:

We focus on the classification of descriptions of legal obligations in the Legal Taxonomy Syllabus. We compare the results of classification using increasing levels of semantic information. Firstly, we use the text of the concept description, analysed via the TULE syntactic parser, to disambiguate syntactically and select informative nouns. Secondly, we add as additional features for the classifier the concepts (via their ontological ID) which have been semi-automatically linked to the text by knowledge engineers in order to disambiguate the meaning of relevant phrases which are associated to concepts in the ontology. Thirdly, we consider concepts related to the prescriptions by relations such as deontological clause and sanction.

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

Boyd, Hoffman, et al. on Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints

Professor Dr. Christina L. Boyd of the State University of New York (SUNY) – Department of Political Science, Professor David A. Hoffman of the Temple University School of Law and the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School, and colleagues, have posted Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints.

This article has been published in: Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 10(2), 253-287 (2013): http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jels.12010

Here is the abstract:

This project empirically explores civil litigation from its inception by examining the content of civil complaints. We utilize spectral cluster analysis on a newly compiled federal district court dataset of causes of action in complaints to illustrate the relationship of legal claims to one another, the broader composition of lawsuits in trial courts, and the breadth of pleading in individual complaints. Our results shed light not only on the networks of legal theories in civil litigation but also on how lawsuits are classified and the strategies that plaintiffs and their attorneys employ when commencing litigation. This approach permits us to lay the foundations for a more precise and useful taxonomy of federal litigation than has been previously available, one that, after the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal (2009), has also arguably never been more relevant than it is today.

This study is notable for several reasons, including that Computational Legal Studies founders Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito commented on the statistical methodology used in the study, and that the study uses government data made public through RECAP, the open government data project developed by Harlan Yu, Stephen Schultze, and Timothy B. Lee, all of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Further, this study exemplifies the scholarly use of open government data predicted by David Robinson, Harlan Yu, and Ed Felten, in their influential article, Government Data and the Invisible Hand.

HT @freemoth.

Slides from 2011 ITTIG-CNR Workshop: From Information to Knowledge: On Line Access to Legal Information

Slides have been posted for presentations at From Information to Knowledge: On Line Access to Legal Information, a workshop organised by ITTIG-CNR in conjunction with Festival d’Europa 2011, on 6 May 2011, in Florence, Italy.

Full text of revised versions of many of the papers has been published in: Maria Angela Biasiotti and Sebastiano Faro (Eds.), From Information to Knowledge – Online Access to Legal Information: Methodologies, Trends and Perspectives (IOS, 2011).

Here is a list of the papers presented, with links to slides, abstracts, and revised full text where available:

• Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute: Access to legislation in the semantic web (click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Cedric Chailloux, Publications Office of the European Union – EUR-Lex Unit: The new EUR-Lex: improvement and redesign (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text, by Els Breedstraet);
• Carol Tullo, The National Archives – Information Policy and Services – UK: Online access to UK legislation: strategy and structure (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Filippo Donati, University of Florence: Access to legal information in the European Union (Click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Boella, L. Humphreys, P. Rossi, and L. van der Torre: Eunomos, a legal document management system based on legislative XML and ontologies (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• K.E. Petersen: Experiences with “Lex Dania Live” (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• B. Bassi: Automatic classification of documents for the Library of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Melih Karakullukçu: Proper treatment of gaps in legal data and in electronic legal research (Click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Marc van Opijnen: European Case-law identifier: a short history and the broad outlook (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Damele, M. Dogliani., A. Mastropaolo, F. Pallante and D.P. Radicioni: On legal argumentation tecniques: towards a systematic approach (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text.);
• D. Bourcier and M. Fernández-Barrera: Challenges regarding legal metadata. IP licensing and management of different cognitive levels in the Web 2.0 (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Peruginelli, D. Tiscornia, G. Greenleaf, A. Mowbray and P. Chung: A comprehensive free access legal information system for Europe (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• R. Caso, P. Guarda and V. Moscon: Open Access to legal scholarship and Open Archives: towards a better future? (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text).

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

[NOTE: This post has been updated to reflect the extended deadline of 19 February 2012. HT Simonetta Montemagni.]

A call for papers — with extended submission deadline of 19 February 2012 — has been issued for SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, to be held 27 May 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

SPLeT 2012 is being held in conjunction with LREC 2012: The Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.

Papers for SPLeT 2012 are invited on the following topics:

• Construction, extension, merging, customization of legal language resources, e.g. terminologies, ontologies
• Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts
• Semantic annotation of legal textual corpora
• Legal text processing
• Machine learning of legal texts
• Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing
• Legal thesauri mapping
• Automatic Classification of legal documents
• Logical analysis of legal language
• Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism
• Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments
• Dialogue protocols for argumentation
• Legal argument ontology
• Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural language
• Controlled language systems for law

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

Calls for Papers: Workshops @ ICAIL 2011

Calls for papers, with diverse submission deadlines, have been issued for the workshops at ICAIL 2011: The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law; the workshops are scheduled to be held 6 and 10 June 2011, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

DESI IV: Workshop on Setting Standards for Searching Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings, 6 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 1 April 2011: Research papers;
• 22 April 2011: Position papers.

Workshop on Agent Model-Based Reasoning in Law, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 14 March 2011.

Computational Law: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 20 April 2011.

AI & Evidential Inference, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• TBA

AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• 31 March 2011.

Coherence 2011: Artificial Intelligence, Coherence, and Judicial Reasoning, 10 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 15 April 2011: Abstracts;
• 3 June 2011: Full papers.

HT JURIX.

Call for Papers: Workshop on Applying Human Language Technology to the Law

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 31 March 2011 — has been issued for AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, a workshop to be held 10 June 2011, at ICAIL 2011: The Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

[If the call for papers or the workshop Website is down, click here for the cached version.]

Papers are invited on the following topics:

The workshop will focus on extraction of information from legal text, representations of legal language (ontologies and semantic translations), and dialogic aspects. While information extraction and retrieval are crucial areas, the workshop emphasises syntactic, semantic, and dialogic aspects of legal information processing.

Building legal resources: terminologies, ontologies, corpora.
Ontologies of legal texts, including subareas such as ontology acquisition, ontology customisation, ontology merging, ontology extension, ontology evolution, lexical information, etc.
Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts.
Semantic annotation of legal texts.
Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing.
Legal thesauri mapping.
Automatic Classification of legal documents.
Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism.
Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments.
Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural language.
Controlled language systems for law.
Name matching and alias detection.
Dialogue protocols and systems for legal discussion.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

JURIX 2010 Slides Available

Slides are now available for many papers given at JURIX 2010: The 23rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, held 16-17 December 2010 at the University of Liverpool Computer Science Department, in Liverpool, England, UK.

HT JURIX Blog.

Deadline Extended to 17 January: Call for Papers for ICAIL 2011

[NOTE: The call for papers submission deadline has been extended to 17 January 2011, according to @JackGConrad.]

A call for papers has been issued for ICAIL 2011: The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, to be held 6-10 June 2011 at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

The conference is organized by IAAIL: The International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law.

A mentoring program is being offered for authors wishing to submit papers to the conference.

Here are the submission deadlines:

• “Mentoring program request deadline: November 8, 2010
• Mentoring program paper deadline: November 15, 2010
• Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 6, 2010
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 3, 2011″
• Submission of papers extended deadline: January 17, 2011

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Formal and computational models of legal reasoning
• Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining
• Computational models of argumentation and decision making
• Legal knowledge representation including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
• Modeling negotiation and contract formation
• Computational models of case-based legal reasoning
• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
• Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
• E-discovery and e-disclosure
• Automatic legal text classification and summarization
• Machine learning and data mining applied to legal databases”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Jack G. Conrad.