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.

Lu and Conrad on Bringing Order to Legal Documents: An Issue-based Recommendation System via Cluster Association

Qiang Lu and Jack G. Conrad, both of Thomson Reuters, will present a paper entitled Bringing Order to Legal Documents: An Issue-based Recommendation System via Cluster Association, at KEOD 2012: The 4th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development, to be held 4-7 October 2012 in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

Here is the abstract:

The task of recommending content to professionals (such as attorneys or brokers) differs greatly from the task of recommending news to casual readers. A casual reader may be satisfied with a couple of good recommendations, whereas an attorney will demand precise and comprehensive recommendations from various content sources when conducting legal research. Legal documents are intrinsically complex and multi-topical, contain carefully crafted, professional, domain-specific language, and possess a broad and unevenly distributed coverage of issues. Consequently, a high quality content recommendation system for legal documents requires the ability to detect significant topics from a document and recommend high quality content accordingly. Moreover, a litigation attorney preparing for a case needs to be thoroughly familiar the principal arguments associated with various supporting opinions, but also with the secondary and tertiary arguments as well. This paper introduces an issue-based content recommendation system with a built-in topic detection/segmentation algorithm for the legal domain. The system leverages existing legal document metadata such as topical classifications, document citations, and click stream data from user behavior databases, to produce an accurate topic detection algorithm. It then links each individual topic to a comprehensive pre-defined topic (cluster) repository via an association process. A cluster labeling algorithm is designed and applied to provide a precise, meaningful label for each of the clusters in the repository, where each cluster is also populated with member documents from across different content types. This system has been applied successfully to very large collections of legal documents, O(100M), which include judicial opinions, statutes, regulations, court briefs, and analytical documents. Extensive evaluations were conducted to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of the algorithms in topic detection, cluster association, and cluster labeling. Subsequent evaluations conducted by legal domain experts have demonstrated that the quality of the resulting recommendations across different content types is close to those created by human experts.

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

Thanks to Jack for allowing me to post the abstract.

Help Update Wikipedia’s “Artificial Intelligence and Law” Entry

Jack G. Conrad of Thomson Reuters is seeking volunteers to update the “Artificial Intelligence and Law” entry on Wikipedia.

HT @JackGConrad.

Call for Papers: SIRE 2011: SIGIR 2011 Information Retrieval for E-Discovery Workshop

A call for papers — with submission deadlines of 13 May 2011 for research papers and 3 June 2011 for position papers — has been posted for SIRE 2011: SIGIR 2011 Information Retrieval for E-Discovery Workshop, to be held 28 July 2011 in Beijing, China.

The workshop will be collocated with SIGIR 2011: The 34th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Distributed search of large heterogeneous enterprise information systems, including corporate intranets, archival and backup repositories, cloud-based storage, etc.
• High-recall search of large collections, including those with high densities of relevant documents
• Supervised learning of classifiers for responsiveness, privilege and other factors of interest (sometimes referred to in e-discovery as predictive coding)
• IR techniques that leverage the characteristics of specific types of business records (email, instant messages, voice mail, file systems, etc.)
• Clustering, link analysis, and other methods for discovering structure in large collections, including detection of duplicate documents
• Process design for human-in-the-loop review and exploitation of large data sets, including measurement of inter-reviewer consistency, active learning, etc.
• Evaluation design, including sampling strategies, estimation of confidence intervals, and reusability of large test collections

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Jack G. Conrad.

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.

December 6 Deadline: ICAIL 2011 Workshop & Tutorial Proposals

[NOTE: 6 December 2010 is the deadline for submitting workshop and tutorial proposals.]

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 remaining submission deadlines:

• “Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 6, 2010
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 3, 2011
• Submission of papers deadline: January 10, 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.

Call for Papers: ICAIL 2011

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 deadline: January 10, 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.