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

Almajano et al. on v-mWater: An e-Government Application for Water Rights Agreements

Pablo Almajano, Dr. Tomas Trescak, Dr. Marc Esteva, Professor Dr. Inmaculada Rodríguez, and Professor Dr. Maite López-Sánchez, have published v-mWater: An e-Government Application for Water Rights Agreements, in Agreement Technologies (pp. 583-595), edited by Sascha Ossowski (Springer 2013).

Here is the abstract:

Nowadays, governments are increasingly taking advantage of Information and Communication Technologies to provide services over the internet (the so-called e-Government applications) to citizens, businesses, employees, and agencies. We argue that e-government services will benefit from being distributed and intelligent, and thus, that they can be modelled as Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). The field of MAS focuses on the design and development of systems composed of autonomous entities which interact within an environment in order to achieve their common or individual goals. Nevertheless, although humans can be seen as autonomous entities, most MAS methodologies and infrastructures do not consider direct human participation. In general, the human role is limited to acting behind the scenes by customising provided agent templates. The resulting agents participate in the system on humans’ behalf. In order to overcome this limitation we propose using 3D Virtual Worlds, which is one of a very few technologies that provides all the necessary means for direct human inclusion inside software systems. 3D Virtual Worlds are 3D graphical environments where humans participate represented as graphical embodied characters (avatars) and can interact there by using simple and intuitive control facilities. We advocate that 3D Virtual Worlds technology can be successfully used for “opening” multiagent systems to humans. This idea is used in Virtual Institutions, which combine Electronic Institutions and 3D Virtual Worlds to engineer applications where participants may be human and software agents. In this chapter we present the prototype v-mWater, a virtual market based on trading Water. It is an e-Government application in the agriculture domain modelled as a Virtual Institution where participants are irrigators and employees of a hydrographic basin. We present the specification of the system, the virtual world generation from this specification and its deployment using the Virtual Institution eXEcution Environment (VIXEE). Finally, we show an example execution of our virtual market in order to illustrate the advantages of our approach.

Sileno, Boer, and van Engers: The Institutional Stance in Agent-based Simulations

Giovanni Sileno, M. Sc., Dr. Alexander Boer, and Professor Dr. Tom Van Engers, all of the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam, presented a paper entitled The Institutional Stance in Agent-based Simulations, at ICAART 2013: International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, held 15-18 February in Barcelona.

Here is the abstract:

This paper presents a multi-agent framework intended to animate scenarios of compliance and non-compliance in a normative system. With the purpose of describing social human behaviour, we choose to reduce social complexity by creating models of the involved agents starting from stories, and completing them with background theories derived from common-sense and expert knowledge. For this reason, we explore how an institutional perspective can be taken into account in a computational framework. Roles, institutions and rules become components of the agent architecture. The social intelligence of the agent is distributed to several cognitive modules, performing the institutional thinking, whose outcomes are coordinated in the main decision-making cycle. The institutional logic is analyzed from a general simulation perspective, and a concrete possible choice is presented, drawn from fundamental legal concepts. As a concrete result, a preliminary implementation of the framework has been developed with Jason.

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

Click here for abstracts of other papers presented at ICAART 2013.

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.

Call for papers: RuleML 2013: International Web Rule Symposium

The call for papers has been issued for RuleML 2013: International Web Rule Symposium, to be held 11-13 July 2013 in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Submission deadlines are 19 February for abstracts and 20 February for full papers.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Rules and automated reasoning
• Rule-based policies, reputation, and trust
• Rule-based event processing and reaction rules
• Rules and the web
• Fuzzy rules and uncertainty
• Logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning
• Non-classical logics and the web (e.g modal and epistemic logics)
• Hybrid methods for combining rules and statistical machine learning techniques (e.g., conditional random fields, PSL)
• Rule transformation, extraction, and learning
• Vocabularies, ontologies, and business rules
• Rule markup languages and rule interchange formats
• Rule-based distributed/multi-agent systems
• Rules, agents, and norms
• Rule-based communication, dialogue, and argumentation models
• Vocabularies and ontologies for pragmatic primitives (e.g. speech acts and deontic primitives)
• Pragmatic web reasoning and distributed rule inference / rule execution
• Rules in online market research and online marketing
• Applications of rule technologies in health care and life sciences
• Legal rules and legal reasoning
• Industrial applications of rules
• Controlled natural language for rule encoding (e.g. SBVR, ACE, CLCE)
• Standards activities related to rules
• General rule topics

For more details, please see the call.

LegalRuleML, a law-specific version of RuleML currently being developed by the OASIS LegalRuleML Technical Committee, will be discussed at the conference, and papers about LegalRuleML are welcome. Click here for slides of a tutorial about LegalRuleML.

HT Dr. Roland Vogl

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

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

Riveret, Rotolo & Sartor: Probabilistic rule-based argumentation for norm-governed learning agents

Dr. Régis Riveret, Professor Dr. Antonino Rotolo, and Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor have published Probabilistic rule-based argumentation for norm-governed learning agents, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

This paper proposes an approach to investigate norm-governed learning agents which combines a logic-based formalism with an equation-based counterpart. This dual formalism enables us to describe the reasoning of such agents and their interactions using argumentation, and, at the same time, to capture systemic features using equations. The approach is applied to norm emergence and internalisation in systems of learning agents. The logical formalism is rooted into a probabilistic defeasible logic instantiating Dung’s argumentation framework. Rules of this logic are attached with probabilities to describe the agents’ minds and behaviours as well as uncertain environments. Then, the equation-based model for reinforcement learning, defined over this probability distribution, allows agents to adapt to their environment and self-organise.

Andrighetto and Conte on Cognitive Dynamics of Norm Compliance

Dr. Giulia Andrighetto and Dr. Rosaria Conte, both of Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology, CNR, have published Cognitive dynamics of norm compliance. From norm adoption to flexible automated conformity, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

‘In this paper, an integrated, cognitive view of different mechanisms, reasons and pathways to norm compliance is presented. After a short introduction, theories of norm compliance are reviewed, and found to group in four main typologies: the rational choice model of norm compliance; theories based on conditional preferences to conformity, theories of thoughtless conformity, and theories of norm internalization. In the third section of the paper, the normative architecture EMIL-A is presented. Previous work discussed the epistemic module of this normative architecture, allowing for the generation of normative beliefs being formed. The fourth and fifth sections present the pragmatic modules of EMIL-A, i.e. norm adoption—leading to normative goals—and norm compliance—leading to their execution. Not only are several alternative reasons for norm adoption shown, but also several pathways to norm compliance are identified. Finally, a summary and ideas for future works conclude the paper.

Auber & Müller: Incorporating Norms in a Model to Simulate the Management of Renewable Resources

Sigrid Aubert and Jean-Pierre Müller, both of CIRAD, have published Incorporating institutions, norms and territories in a generic model to simulate the management of renewable resources, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

Management of the renewable natural resources in Madagascar is gradually being transferred to the local communities, particularly that of forest resources. However, these local communities are struggling to assess the consequences of management plans that they themselves must develop and implement on ecologically, economically and socially sustainable grounds. In order to highlight key aspects of different management options beforehand, we have developed MIRANA, a computer model to simulate various scenarios of management plan implementation. MIRANA differs from other simulation models by not only taking into account individual practices and economic exchanges, but also by accounting for the applicable regulations. These regulations are taken into consideration by means of a multiplicity of normative structures within a spatial context. The objective of this paper is to describe the representations of institutions, norms and territories proposed by MIRANA and to discuss these representations in relation to the state of the art in the field of normative multi-agent systems.