10-14 June: ICAIL 2013: Links and Resources

ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, is being held 10-14 June 2013 in Rome, Italy.

Click here for the conference Website.

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for the list of tutorials and workshops.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #icail2013 and the conference Twitter account is @ICAIL2013

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

Legal informatics papers at We Robot 2013 Conference

Some legal informatics papers or panels are included in the program for the 2013 We Robot Conference, to be held 8-9 April 2013 at Stanford Law School, in Stanford, California, USA:

Panel: Law as Algorithm
Speakers: Peter Asaro, Lisa Shay, Woodrow Hartzog
Moderator: Harry Surden
Related Papers:
On Implicit and Explicit Legal Requirements for Human Judgment
Do Robots Dream of Electric Laws? An Experiment in Law as Algorithm
[...]

Panel: Designing Values
Speakers: Ergun Calisgan, AJung Moon, Aneta Podsiadla
Moderator: Ian Kerr
Related Papers:
Open Roboethics Pilot: Accelerating Policy Design, Implementation and Demonstration of Socially Acceptable Robot Behaviors
What Robotics Can Learn from the Contemporary Problems of Information Technologies Sector- Compliance and Enforcement of Privacy by Design
[...]

Paper: Programming Robotic Decisions with Potentially Lethal Outcomes: Comparing Self-Driving Cars and Autonomous Weapon Systems, and How They Should Be Regulated as Their Autonomous Capabilities Evolve
Authors: Kenneth Anderson, Matthew Waxman
Commentator: Dan Siciliano (Stanford University Rock Center)

HT @LawandLit

Maclean: Rethinking Law as Process: Creativity, Novelty, Change

Dr. James Maclean of the University of Southampton Law School has published a new book entitled Rethinking Law as Process: Creativity, Novelty, Change, (Routledge, 2013).

Here is the abstract:

Rethinking Law as Process draws on insights from ‘process philosophy’ in order to rethink the nature of legal decision-making. While there have been significant developments in the application of ‘process’ thought across a number of disciplines, little notice has been taken of Whiteheadian metaphysics in law. Nevertheless, process thought offers significant opportunities for serious inquiry into the nature of legal reasoning and the practical application of law. Focusing on the practices of organising, rather than their effects, an increased processual awareness re-orients understanding away from the mechanistic and rationalist assumptions of Newtonian thought, and towards the interminable ontological quest to arrest or to classify the essentially undivided flow of human experience. Drawing together insights from a number of different fields, James Maclean argues that it is because our inherited conceptual framework is tied to a ‘static’ way of thinking that every attempt to offer justifying reasons for legal decisions appears at best to register only at the level of explanation. Rethinking Law as Process resolves this problem, and so provides a more adequate description of the nature of law and legal decision-making, by repositioning law within a thoroughly processual world-view, in which there is only the continuous effort to refine and to redefine the continuous flux of legal understanding.

This book could provide a theoretical framework for research on a number of recent developments in legal technology, law practice, and legal education, including legal decision support systems, legal compliance systems, norm development in multiagent systems, the unbundling of legal services, legal process management, and innovation in legal technology, law practice, legal services delivery, and legal education.

HT @law_book

Call for Papers: Special issue of AI & Law on Computational Methods for Enforcing Privacy and Fairness

Dr. Thomas F. Gordon of Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communications Systems (FOKUS) tells us that a call for papers has been issued for a special issue of the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law on the topic, “Computational Methods for Enforcing Privacy and Fairness in the Knowledge Society”.

The submission deadline is 15 April 2013.

Here is an excerpt from the call:

We invite contributions on methodologies, techniques, algorithms, and tools in support of the analysis or of the enforcement of privacy, non-discrimination, and other personal rights in ICT systems for the knowledge society. Special focus is on multi-disciplinary approaches on the following, non-exhaustive, list of topics, and that relate to Artificial Intelligence and Law:

• Methods for enforcing data privacy and anonymity
• Methods for data portability, and for the right to oblivion
• Methods for data protection and law enforcement
• Privacy by-design in intelligent systems
• Privacy-preserving data mining
• Privacy policies in social networks
• Context-aware location privacy
• Methods for unbiased data collection and processing
• Methods for enforcing fairness in profiling and targeting
• Methods for discrimination discovery from data
• Statistical measures of discrimination
• Methods for discrimination prevention in data mining
• Computational argumentation in discrimination analysis
• Design of (quasi-)experimental methods
• Computational models of segregation in social networks
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Tools and systems, with case studies [...]

For more details, please see the complete call.

HT Tom Gordon

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.

Surden on Computable Contracts

Professor Harry Surden of the University of Colorado Law School has published Computable Contracts, UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 46, pp. 629-700 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

It is possible to formulate contractual obligations so that computers can “understand” and make prima-facie compliance assessments with specified terms and conditions. Such a contractual obligation, formulated specifically for computer processability, is what this Article terms a “computable contract.” Computable contracts are not merely theoretical, but instead are increasingly being used in economically significant domains. Certain widely used financial contracts exemplify this model. The emergence of computable contracts has largely been unrecognized in the legal literature. However, computable contracting is not extensible across all, or even most, contracting scenarios. Rather, it is limited to a small subset of contracting scenarios involving standardization, and relative legal and factual certainty.

Drawing upon computer science research, this Article provides a theoretical account of computable contracting. It first explains how firms can communicate contracting information to computers by representing contracts as data instead of (or in addition to) the traditional written language form. Formalizing contractual obligations in this way is what is termed “data-oriented” contracting. The representation of contractual obligations as data, in turn, allows for novel contracting properties. For example, parties can effectively “translate” certain contractual criteria into a comparable set of computer-processable rules. To make contracts “computable”, parties provide computer systems with external data that is relevant to performance. This model is supported by contemporary examples of computable contracts in domains ranging from finance to intellectual property. This Article also provides principles for distinguishing contracting scenarios that are amenable to computability from those that are not.

Click here for video (in QuickTime format, .mov) of Professor Surden’s presentation of this article at Stanford Law School, October 2011.

Click here for the abstract of Professor Surden’s presentation of this article at Stanford Law School, October 2011.

Call for Papers: DESI V: Workshop on Standards for Using Predictive Coding and Other Machine Learning Algorithms

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 1 May 2013 — has been issued for DESI V: Workshop on Standards for Using Predictive Coding and Other Machine Learning Algorithms, to be held 14 June 2013 in Rome, Italy, following ICAIL 2013: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Papers addressing the following questions are invited for DESI V:

1) How transparent can and should the process be in sharing seed sets or training sets of documents with opposing parties, including the sharing of privileged documents?

2) What differences if any exist between seed sets developed through random sampling versus other forms of judgmental sampling (including picking seed documents using keywords)?

3) How are non-relevant documents used to optimize machine learning algorithms and should they be subject to similar disclosure?

4) Are there ways in which predictive coding and machine learning methods can be tuned to find highly relevant (“hot”) documents in large collections?

5) To what extent is metadata important in tuning predictive coding software to find similarity in documents?

6) In light of past research at the TREC Legal Track and elsewhere, are there absolute targets for metrics in recall and precision that could serve as standards in every case, or are achieving certain metrics dependent on the relevant data set and legal context?

7) What kinds of best practice standards are needed to help improve mutual understanding of what was actually done, and to improve overall “search quality”?

8) How should predictive coding techniques be audited in connection with an entity submitting itself to an ISO 9001 quality measurement process?

9) To what extent can and should machine learning approaches be used in other phases of the litigation process, to assist in aspects of the process such as identification, preservation, and collection?

10)What are the applications of predictive coding and other forms of machine learning in related “compliance” areas, including regulatory, enforcement, and investigations?

The workshop discussion will be grounded in the results of the recently completed TREC Legal Track, especially where supervised learning methods have shown promising results in terms of being able to more cost-effectively demonstrate rates of recall and precision that approximate the best that could be obtained through other methods, including exhaustive manual review.

For more details, please see the complete call.

HT Jurix.

Legal Informatics Papers @ HICSS 2013

At least two legal informatics papers will be presented this week at HICSS 46 (a.k.a. HICSS 2013): Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, being held 7-10 January 2013 in Maui, Hawaii:

• Keith Walker and Douglas Oard: Extending Argument Maps To Provide Decision Support For Rulemaking
• Petra Asprion and Gerhard Knolmayer: Assimilation of Compliance Software in Highly Regulated Industries: An Empirical Multitheoretical Investigation

I’ve requested abstracts from the authors and if the authors allow posting of their abstracts I will post what I receive.

Meanwhile, for abstracts or full text of the papers please contact the authors.

Click here for the complete conference program.

The Twitter hashtags for the conference appear to be #hicss46 and #hicss.

If you know of other legal informatics papers to be presented at HICSS, please mention them in the comments.

Oberle et al.: Engineering Compliant Software: Advising Developers by Automating Legal Reasoning

Daniel Oberle and Christian Baumann of SAP Research Karlsruhe, and Felix Drefs, Richard Wacker, and Oliver Raabe of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute of Information and Economic Law, have published Engineering Compliant Software: Advising Developers by Automating Legal Reasoning, SCRIPTed 9(3), article 280 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

The impact of software on human interactions is ever increasing. However, software developers are often unaware of statutory provisions that regulate human interactions. As a consequence, software is increasingly coming into conflict with such provisions. Therefore, this paper contributes an approach for advising the developer in designing software that complies to statutory provisions. The approach relies on the formalisation of statutory provisions and semi-automated legal reasoning assisted by the developer.