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

Call for Papers: LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference

The call for papers and presentation proposals has been issued for LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 26-27 September 2013 on the Channel Island of Jersey.

The conference Website does not seem to state the deadline for submitting papers or proposals. If you know the submission deadline, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.

[UPDATE 11 February 2013: The conference organizers now say the submission deadline is 31 March 2013.]

Papers are invited on the topics covered by any of the seven tracks in which the conference program is divided:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access
• Privacy v open government in legal publishing
• Emerging patterns of information access and usage
• Technological development and free access to law

The conference Twitter account is @JerseyLVI2013 and the conference hashtag is #lvi2013

For details about the tracks, please see the track Websites.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference Website.

Call for Papers: AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems

A call for papers — with abstract submission deadline of 28 February 2013 and full paper submission deadline of 15 May 2013 — has been issued for AICOL 2013: Workshop on AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems, to be held at a date to be determined, between 21 and 27 July 2013, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

The workshop is being collocated with XXVI. World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.

Papers for AICOL 2013 are invited on the following topics:

• Law and Science
• Knowledge Management
• Law and Cognitive Science
• Cognitive schemas
• Law and Complexity Theory
• Law and Robotics
• Complex Systems
• Law and Mathematics
• Legal Theory
• Legal Graphic Representation
• Legal Culture
• Game Theory
• Computer Ethics
• Formalization of Legal Systems and Norms
• Artificial Societies
• Rules and Standards
• Argumentative Frameworks
• Agreement technologies
• Legal Ontologies
• Electronic Institutions
• Governance
• Legal Concepts
• Legal Information Retrieval
• Legal Thesauri
• Online Dispute Resolution
• Taxonomies
• Trends in e-Discovery, e-Courts, e-Administration
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Legal Knowledge Acquisition
• Users’ studies
• Legal Knowledge Representation

For more details, please see the call.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

Adreani: Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf

Guillaume Adreani of AHJUCAF has published Retour d’expérience sur Juricaf, la base de données de jurisprudence francophone, Revue générale du droit, January 2013.

The post describes the technology and functionality of Juricaf, the free and open database of francophone supreme court decisions, with particular emphasis on its use of open source software — including Apache Solr and CouchDB — its exposure of metadata in several formats including Dublin Core, its use of schema.org microdata, and the compatibility of its metadata with the Zotero open source citation management system.

Here are excerpts from the introduction:

Juricaf est une base de données de décisions de justice en français accessible gratuitement à l’adresse . Créée à l’initiative de l’AHJUCAF, l’association des cours de cassation francophones et réalisée par le Laboratoire Normologie, linguistique et informatique du Droit de l’Université de Paris I, elle publie à ce jour près de 800 000 documents issus de 42 pays et institutions francophones. Elle bénéficie également du soutien de l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. [...]

Quels sont les facteurs-clés pour la réussite d’un tel projet ?
Le moteur de recherche est au cœur d’un tel outil. Ses performances sont liées à l’utilisation d’outils en Open source. Trois autres critères sont déterminants pour que le projet soit crédible :

• Une alimentation en décisions de justice et une mise à jour automatisée,
• L’ajout d’innovations documentaires,
• Une exposition maximale des métadonnées. [...]

For more details, please see the complete article.

HT @adreagui

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.

TREC Legal Track 2013 Reported Canceled

The 2013 TREC Legal Track has been cancelled “because of ongoing unspecified problems with the data set,” Evan Koblentz reports TREC Legal Track co-organizer Professor Dr. Gordon Cormack as having said after a 29 January 2013 panel at the Legal Tech New York conference, according to Koblentz’s article, “LegalTech Day One: Relativity 8, Statistical Sampling, Law Firm Security,” Law Technology News, 30 January 2013.

This would be the second consecutive year in which TREC Legal Track has been cancelled.

The TREC Legal Track is a major legal information retrieval conference. Its findings have contributed substantially to research respecting electronic discovery (ediscovery).

Click here for earlier posts about the TREC Legal Track.

Click here for proceedings of previous years of the TREC Legal Track, contained in the general TREC proceedings.

Click here for published papers that report results of research involving data used in connection with TREC Legal Track.

HT @LawTechEvan

Chen et al.: A text mining approach to assist the general public in the retrieval of legal documents

Yen-Liang Chen and Yi-Hung Liu, both of National Central University Department of Information Management, and Wu-Liang Ho of the Straits Exchange Foundation, have published A text mining approach to assist the general public in the retrieval of legal documents, forthcoming in JASIST.

Here is the abstract:

Applying text mining techniques to legal issues has been an emerging research topic in recent years. Although some previous studies focused on assisting professionals in the retrieval of related legal documents, they did not take into account the general public and their difficulty in describing legal problems in professional legal terms. Because this problem has not been addressed by previous research, this study aims to design a text-mining-based method that allows the general public to use everyday vocabulary to search for and retrieve criminal judgments. The experimental results indicate that our method can help the general public, who are not familiar with professional legal terms, to acquire relevant criminal judgments more accurately and effectively.

HT @asist_org

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

Sinha on Speed and Relevance Improvements to Indian Kanoon

Dr. Sushant Sinha of Indian Kanoon has posted Faster and More Relevant Kanoon!, at the Indian Kanoon forums.

He writes:

A new release of IndianKanoon brings in the following changes:
1. A new tiering function that slims down the top tier and significantly improves the time taken to execute a query.
2. A new ranking function to improve relevance.
3. Improved word matching and abbreviations. A search of “adm jabalpur” will match “additional district magistrate jabalpur”
http://www.indiankanoon.org/search/?formInput=adm+jabalpur
4. New operators ANDD, ORR and NOTT that can be used with words
5. Clicking on a document after a search query shows the contexts in the document in which the query appears.
6. Performance improvements coming from upgrade to Postgresql 9.2

For more information or to provide comments, please see the complete post.

HT @sushantsinha

Archived Tweets and Resources from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

Click here for archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format, from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012 at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.

Click here for the conference Website.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

For blog posts and other resources related to the conference, please see the comments to this post.