Call for Papers: Argumentation 2012

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 7 September 2012 — has been issued for Argumentation 2012: International Conference on Alternative Methods of Argumentation in Law, to be held 26 October 2012, at the Masaryk University Faculty of Law, in Brno, Czech Republic.

According to the conference announcement:

The conference consists of four workshops/streams, each specialized in a specific and unique method of studying legal argumentation:

• Formal Methods in Legal Reasoning
• Law and Literature
• Law and Language
• Visualization of Law

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Formal and quantitative models of legal reasoning
• Logical tools in designing legal arguments
• Argumentation schemes, models of legal inference
• Mathematical and computational tools for modelling arguments and reasoning
• Evidence, burdens of persuasion and proof
• Interpretation of literature in jurisprudence
• Artistic description of contemporary law
• Exploitation of literature in legal education
• Literature in legal argumentation
• Literature in rationalization of law
• Use of literature in court decisions
• Propaganda in service of law and jurisprudence
• Speech and register analysis
• Symbols and communication in law
• IT, language and law
• Literary analysis of law
• Natural language
• Analysis of legal narratives
• Rhetorical devices in legal reasoning
• Media studies
• Multisensory law
• Visualisation in legal education
• Visualising legal reasoning
• Argument mapping
• Structuring the complexity of law via visualisation
• Visual literacy in law
• Pictorial law

For more information, please see the call.

HT Jurix.

Mochales and Moens on Argumentation Mining in ECHR Texts

Rachel Mochales Palau and Professor Dr. Marie-Francine Moens, both of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Afdeling Informatica, have published Argumentation Mining, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

Argumentation mining aims to automatically detect, classify and structure argumentation in text. Therefore, argumentation mining is an important part of a complete argumentation analyisis, i.e. understanding the content of serial arguments, their linguistic structure, the relationship between the preceding and following arguments, recognizing the underlying conceptual beliefs, and understanding within the comprehensive coherence of the specific topic. We present different methods to aid argumentation mining, starting with plain argumentation detection and moving forward to a more structural analysis of the detected argumentation. Different state-of-the-art techniques on machine learning and context free grammars are applied to solve the challenges of argumentation mining. We also highlight fundamental questions found during our research and analyse different issues for future research on argumentation mining.

The techniques discussed in the paper are illustrated in part through their application to a corpus of texts issued by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Bench-Capon & Prakken on Using Argument Schemes for Hypothetical Reasoning in Law

Professor Dr. Trevor Bench-Capon of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and Professor Dr. Henry Prakken of the University of Groningen Faculty of Law have published Using Argument Schemes for Hypothetical Reasoning in Law, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

This paper studies the use of hypothetical and value-based reasoning in US Supreme-Court cases concerning the United States Fourth Amendment. Drawing upon formal AI & Law models of legal argument a semi-formal reconstruction is given of parts of the Carney case, which has been studied previously in AI & law research on case-based reasoning. As part of the reconstruction, a semi-formal proposal is made for extending the formal AI & Law models with forms of metalevel reasoning in several argument schemes. The result is compared with Rissland’s (1989) analysis in terms of dimensions and Ashley’s (2008) analysis in terms of his process model of legal argument with hypotheticals.