Palmirani et al., eds.: AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems: Papers from AICOL III

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani, Professor Dr. Ugo Pagallo, Professor Dr. Pompeu Casanovas, and Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor, have edited a new book entitled AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems – Models and Ethical Challenges for Legal Systems, Legal Language and Legal Ontologies, Argumentation and Software Agents (Springer, 2012).

The book contains revised selected papers from International Workshop AICOL-III, Held as Part of the 25th IVR Congress, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, August 15-16, 2011.

HT Professor Palmirani

November 26 Call for Papers Deadline: Legal Resources from Text to Rules: Jurix Workshop

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 26 November 2012 — has been issued for the Jurix 2012 workshop entitled Legal Resources from Text to Rules, to be held 20 December 2012 in Amsterdam.

The workshop is being held in conjunction with JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 17-20 December 2012 at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

Here are details of the workshop:

The time is ripe for investigating the connections between the representation of legal XML texts and their formalization as legal rules.

For years these two communities have pursued their goals separately, but now emerging XML-based standards oriented both to legal documents (Akoma Ntoso, CEN Metalex, national XML standards, etc.) and to legal rules (LKIF, RuleML, RIF, SWRL, LegalRuleML, etc.) justify the possibility to combine techniques and foster their concrete application in the society (compliance, eGov services, legislative drafting, policy making applications, digital legal libraries, etc.).

This workshop aims to examine the relationship between legal computable ontologies as bridges from legal concepts and their legal texts and legal rules (predicates). Hybrid platform where ontologies are used to support legal reasoning and to create bidirectional dialogues with legal knowledge bases are part within the workshop scope.

Questions we will try to address:

• Are the statuses of legal XML standards fixed? What are the next steps?
• Are legal rules autonomous or they need to link their evidences to the text for support?
• Are multiple interpretations of a legal text possible without affecting its representations as legal XML documents?
• What are the roles of the legal ontologies and of semantic web (especially Linked Data) technologies in this scenario?

Proponents: Monica Palmirani, Fabio Vitali, Enrico Francesconi, Tom van Engers, Radboud Winkels

Selected papers will be published in the AICOL IV volume by the end of 2013, after a double peer-review process.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Palmirani

November 21-23: Journées européennes d’informatique juridique: European Legal e-Access Conference

Journées européennes d’informatique juridique: European Legal e-Access Conference is being held 21-23 November 2012 in Paris.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #legalaccess2012

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

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for abstracts and slides of some of the presentations.

See the comments to this post for links to additional videos, slides, and papers from the conference and posts about the conference.

[NOTE: Updated 29 November 2012 to add the line referring readers to the comments.]

[NOTE: Updated 23 November 2012 to link to archived Twitter tweets.]

Bruce Reports on LVI 2012 Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT

A Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT was held 10 October 2012 in Ithaca, New York, immediately following LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute (LII), Cornell Law School, Ithaca, New York, USA. The workshop had the informal title of “Steve the Librarian.” Tom Bruce of the LII sends the following report on the workshop. Thanks to Tom for allowing me to repost his report:

Since I ended up acting as the informal “chair” of the meeting, I suppose I should be the one to fill everyone in. It was, in fact, a meeting of 8 or 10 people around a breakfast table at the Holiday Inn, and not a workshop in any ordinary sense. But it was the latest event in a chain of discussions around this subject that began at LVI in Florence, and continued through the LVI meetings in Durban and Hong Kong, sometimes in conference sessions, sometimes in the FALM business meetings, and sometimes in airport lounges. It is fair to say that this is a recurring topic and an important one.

We outlined three major needs in the field.

One (which I’ve pushed to the point of being a broken record on the subject) is the need for low-threshold, internal communication among the various subdisciplines that touch open access to law. We’ve taken on some of that in VoxPopulii, first under your capable leadership and now with Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger at the helm. It’s vitally necessary that legal informatics researchers learn about the needs of publishers, publishers about librarians, librarians about informatics, and social scientists about all of them (not a complete census but you see what I mean) and that the resulting literature be accessible to non-specialists in the field that is talking about itself. There is room for much more than VoxPopuLii here.

A second is for a publishing venue for people who are working on open access to legal information as researchers in various fields, particularly younger scholars. If you can agree for a moment that we might describe their fields as, for the most part, “law and…” fields, then the journals they now have available to them are all in the fields that are on the other side of the three dots. This has a distorting effect. The availability of very good open-journal software for electronic publication makes good alternatives possible. There is general agreement that because there are so many fields bordering what we all do there is a potentially difficult problem of defining boundaries for such a journal. Initial forays will thus focus pretty tightly on open access to law. Even that is potentially tricky, given that government information of many kinds might be eligible and useful, so firm editorial leadership is called for.

A third is for a comprehensive archive and index to existing work in the field, to be maintained as new stuff is added. One might describe its boundaries as being “all the stuff Rob Richards posts about” , with substantial work on mapping it having been done by you both in formal bibliographies and in blog posts and Twitter. We think there is the possibility of working either with an existing apparatus such as the physics arXiv, or with a purpose-built DSpace installation or some other repository.

Participants in the discussion included Pompeu Casanovas, Graham Greenleaf, Enrico Francesconi, Ginevra Peruginelli, James Lambert, John Heywood, Cicely Wilson, John Joergensen, Amy Taylor, and others whose names I apologize for not retrieving from my faulty memory.

Various individuals have been tasked with pursuing initial steps toward these objectives with the aim of having all or part in place by the time of the next LVI conference (tentatively believed to be in September 2013). We’ll post news as things become concrete.

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.

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]

Francesconi on a Semantic Model for Legal Resources: Annotation and Reasoning over Normative Provisions

Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi of Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica and ITTIG/CNR has posted Semantic Model for Legal Resources: Annotation and Reasoning over Normative Provisions, under review at Semantic Web Journal.

Here is the abstract:

A Semantic Web approach in the legal domain is presented in terms of a model of normative provisions and related axioms. In particular, relation between provisions are identified and modelled by introducing design patterns able to describe Hohfeldian legal fundamental relations and by a query approach able to deal with relations between provisions instances. Examples of semantic annotation of legal textual resources using RDF/OWL standards, as well as advanced access and reasoning facilities over provisions using SPARQL, are shown. The main benefit of the approach is represented by the ability to keep the complexity of the problem within a description logic computational tractability.

Bacci, Francesconi, and Sagri: A Rule-based Parsing Approach for Detecting Case Law References in Italian Court Decisions

Lorenzo Bacci, Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi, and Maria Teresa Sagri, all of ITTIG/CNR, have published A Rule-based Parsing Approach for Detecting Case Law References in Italian Court Decisions, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 27-33.

Here is the abstract:

In this paper a procedure able to detect legal references in Italian court decisions, providing automatic document hyperlinking is described. It is based on the adoption of a naming convention for case law documents, based on the metadata typically used in citations. The parsing strategy in particular is based on regular expressions, able to extract, from legal citations, the metadata used in the adopted naming convention. In particular the parser is able to implement both the ECLI and the LEX naming conventions for case law material.

URN:LEX: New Version 06 Available

A new version 06 of the URN:LEX standard for legal identifiers has been posted. The new version is dated 2 April 2012, and expires 4 October 2012.

The new version has been published by Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council (ITTIG/CNR); Italy, National Centre for ICT in Public Administration (CNIPA) [now DigitPA]; Brazil, Federal Senate, IT Department (PRODASEN); and the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School (LII).

The contacts for the draft are Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi & Pierluigi Spinosa, both of ITTIG/CNR, and Caterina Lupo of CNIPA/DigitPA.

According to Professor Francesconi, the new version contains the following new features:

An http-based syntax of the LEX identifier is included (Appendix D) to cope with different requirements in legal information management, as for example the need of having an identifier compliant with the Linked Data principles.

According to the new version:

The purpose of the “lex” namespace is to assign an unequivocal identifier, in standard format, to documents that are sources of law. To the extent of this namespace, “sources of law” include any legal document within the domain of legislation, case law and administrative acts or regulations; moreover potential “sources of law” (acts under the process of law formation, as bills) are included as well. Therefore “legal doctrine” is explicitly not covered.

The authors have also developed a URN schema handler which can be used in conjunction with URN:LEX.

HT Professor Francesconi.

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Informatica e Diritto on Law and Computational Social Science

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 15 January 2012 — has been issued for a special issue of the journal Informatica e Diritto, on the topic: “Law and Computational Social Science” [Diritto e scienze sociali computazionali].

Papers that use or comment on the following methods as applied to law are invited:

• Automatic extraction and analysis of information;
• Social network analysis;
• Complexity theory;
• Computational simulation;
• Geographic / geospatial information systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi.