JURIX 2012: 17-19 December

JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems is being held 17-19 December 2012, at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix2012

Click here for archived Twitter tweets (in .csv format) from the conference.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for the list of workshops and tutorials.

HT @jurixfoundation

7 September: Extended CfP Deadline for JURIX 2012

The call for papers submission deadline for JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems has been extended to 7 September 2012.

Click here for the call for papers.

The conference will be held 17-19 December 2012 at the University of Amsterdam.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Rinke Hoekstra.

Call for Papers: JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 1 September 2012 — has been issued for JURIX 2012: The 25th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 17-19 December 2012, at the University of Amsterdam, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Burkhard Schafer.

Schafer on ZombAIs: Legal Expert Systems as Representatives “Beyond the Grave”

Professor Burkhard Schafer the University of Edinburgh School of Law has published ZombAIs: Legal Expert Systems as Representatives “Beyond the Grave”, 7 SCRIPTed 384-393 (2010) (Issue No. 2). Here is a summary:

This paper will explore if the “artificial brains” software developed in AI research could become the next generation of tools to exercise control “beyond the grave” and create identify maintaining cues in the way Unruh described which is similar to the “personal backup” popularised in the novels of the Scottish writer Iain Banks. It will argue that such an approach could revitalise previously abandoned themes in legal AI research. In the first part, we develop an analysis of the methodological challenges encountered by legal AI research in developing systems that can autonomously interpret legal norms. In the second part we describe a new application, the use of expert systems in inheritance law, which can use the positive insights that were gained in the early days of research into legal AI, while avoiding the systemic methodological problems earlier, more ambitious projects had encountered.

Maxwell & Schafer on Natural Language Processing and Query Expansion in Legal Information Retrieval

Tamsin Maxwell and Burkhard Schafer, both of the University of Edinburgh, have published Natural Language Processing and Query Expansion in Legal Information Retrieval: Challenges and a Response, 24 International Review of Law, Computers, and Technology 63-72 (2010) (Issue no. 1). Here is the abstract:

As methods in legal information retrieval (IR) evolve to meet the demands of rapidly increasing stores of electronic information, there is the intuitive appeal of capturing detail in legal queries with natural language processing (NLP). One difficulty with this approach is that incorporation of word dependencies in IR has not been shown to consistently and reliably improve results over a unigram bag-of-words approach. We consider challenges faced when incorporating NLP in IR and briefly review three proposals in this vein, highlighting how these might have responded better to requirements in legal search. We then present our novel response based on split query expansion that accounts for the way lawyers seek to apply search results whilst meeting the challenges identified in a unique and flexible manner.