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

Call for Papers: JURIX 2013: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 2 September 2013 — has been posted for JURIX 2013: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 11-13 December 2013, at the University of Bologna.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information and eDiscovery;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web, including legal open data;
• XML standards for legal documents and rules, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more details, please see the call for papers.

HT Jurix

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

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

More white papers from Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice, in Harvard JOLT

Several white papers from the 2012 Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice have been published as Occasional Papers by Harvard Journal of Law & Technology:

• John M. Greacen and William L. Jones: Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice: Analytical Framework
• Stephanie Kimbro: Using Technology to Unbundle in the Legal Services Community
• Marc Lauritsen: A Decision Space for Legal Service Delivery
• Susan Ledray: Virtual Services Whitepaper
• Richard Zorza: Preliminary Thoughts on Blue Sky Technology Driven Access and Decision Systems

HT @LSCtweets

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

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]

7 September: Extended CfP Deadline for JURIX 2012

The call for papers submission deadline for JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems has been extended to 7 September 2012.

Click here for the call for papers.

The conference will be held 17-19 December 2012 at the University of Amsterdam.

Papers are invited “on the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications” concerning the following topics:

• Support for lawyers, in legal reasoning, document drafting, negotiation;
• Support for the production and management of legislation, in agenda setting, policy analysis, drafting, workflow management, monitoring implementation;
• Support for the judiciary, in application of the law, analysis of evidence, management of cases;
• Support for police activities, in forensic inquiries, search and evaluation of evidence, management of investigations;
• Support for public administration, in applying regulations and managing information;
• Support for the acquisition, management or use of legal knowledge, using rules, cases, neural networks, intelligent agents or other methods;
• Systems and methods to support policies and legal issues for social networks;
• Retrieval of legal information;
• Legal education;
• Digital-rights management;
• Alternative dispute resolution, particularly on-line;
• Regulatory compliance and compliance of business processes;
• Theoretical foundations for the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques in the legal domain;
• Models of legal knowledge, including concepts (legal ontologies), rules, cases, principles, values and procedures;
• Legal inference and argumentation;
• Verification and validation of legal knowledge systems;
• Management of legal information in the semantic web;
• XML standards for legal documents, including legislative, judicial, administrative acts as well as private documents, such as contracts;
• Modelling the legal interactions of autonomous agents and digital institutions;
• Methods for managing organizational change when introducing legal knowledge systems;
• Evaluation of systems using advanced informatics techniques in legal applications;
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Rinke Hoekstra.

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.