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.

JURIX 2011: Accepted Papers

Accepted papers have been announced for JURIX 2011: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 14-16 December 2011, at the University of Vienna Centre for Legal Informatics, in Vienna, Austria.

Extended Call for Papers: JURISIN 2011

A call for papers — with an extended submission deadline of 28 September 2011 — has been issued for JURISIN 2011: The Fifth International Workshop on Juris-informatics, to be held 1-2 December 2011, in Takamatsu, Kagawa, Japan.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Legal reasoning
• Argumentation/Argumentation agent
• Legal term ontology
• Formal legal knowledge-base/Intelligent management of legal knowledge-base
• Translation of legal documents
• Computer-aided law education
• Use of Informatics and AI in law
• Legal issues on ubiquitous computing/multi-agent system/the Internet
• Social implications of use of informatics and AI in law

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Call for Papers: JURIX 2011

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 5 September 2011 — has been issued for JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 14-16 December 2011 at the University of Vienna, in Vienna, Austria.

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;
• 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 Professor Dr. Henry Prakken.

Poulshock on Legal Knowledge Systems and the Hammurabi Project

[Update 20 April 2011: Click here for video of the panel containing this presentation. Click here for videos of the entire NELIC conference. HT @LSNTAP.]

Michael Poulshock, Esq., of Stanford University’s CodeX Center for Computers and Law has posted his remarks given at the “Legal Automation” panel at NELIC 2011: The New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference, held 15 April 2011 at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, in Berkeley, California, USA.

The post describes Mr. Poulshock’s views on legal knowledge systems. Mr. Poulshock then explains those views in the context of his Hammurabi Project, “an open source project whose goal is to convert portions of U.S. law into source code, and to make it freely available for anyone to use.”

Mr. Poulshock explains The Hammurabi Project as follows:

The idea is that you should be able to take a provision of the U.S. Code, for example, and then go and find the source code version of it. So you’d have legal source material on one hand, and then you’d have this parallel corpus of the law on the other, in the C# programming language.

Click here to read the entire post.

Click here to read Mr. Poulshock’s earlier post on “Rule-based Legal Information Systems” at VoxPopuLII.

Stevens et al. on The Next Generation of Legal Expert Systems: New Dawn or False Dawn?

Charles Stevens, LL.M., of De Montfort University Law School, Vishal Barot of Loughborough University Wolfson Institute, and Dr. Jenny Carter of DeMontfort University Centre for Computational Intelligence, have posted The Next Generation of Legal Expert Systems-New Dawn or False Dawn?, a paper presented at AI-2010: The Thirtieth SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held 14-16 December 2010 in Cambridge, England, UK. Here is the abstract:

Attempts to apply conventional rule-based expert systems to legal problem-solving raise seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The authors analyse the key challenges of developing a legal expert system by reference to a case study of issues arising in their prototype system, the JAES project. This paper explores the advantages of exploiting three alternative approaches- namely: case-based reasoning, blackboard architecture, and service-oriented architecture for the next generation of legal expert systems. The authors advocate the use of hybrid architecture to address the complexity and dynamic nature of the legal domain. The paper evaluates the extent to which these enhancements can meet the special complexities of the legal domain.

Van Engers & Winkels on The Leibniz Center for Law

Professor Dr. Tom van Engers and Professor Dr. Radboud Winkels, both of Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam, have published The Leibniz Center for Law, 7 SCRIPTed 402-405 (2010) (Issue No. 2). Here is a summary:

The Leibniz Center conducts research and provides education in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and law. In our research we focus on the development and application of techniques from AI to the field of law for the purposes of supporting legal practice and bringing new insights to legal theory. By building computational models of legal reasoning we work in the tradition of Leibniz, developing and using a formal “lingua universalis” and mechanic reasoning procedures providing us with reliable trustworthy results.

The Leibniz Center for Law has longstanding experience on legal ontologies, automatic legal reasoning, legal knowledge-based systems, (standard) languages for representing legal knowledge and information, user-friendly disclosure of legal data, and the application of ICT in education and legal practice. It plays an important role in the development of eGovernance on both national and international levels. The centre provides advice on change-management issues of knowledge-intensive legal processes and the improvement of knowledge-productivity in legal organisations.

The Leibniz Center for Law has participated in many national and international projects for applied research, in which companies, governments and universities cooperate (cf. CLIME, E-POWER, eCOURT, Legal Services Counter). It was the initiator of the CEN MetaLex initiative, an XML interchange-format and standard for legal documents. The Center was recently coordinating partner for two EU-financed projects: TRIAS and ESTRELLA. In TRIAS we developed modular electronic teaching material on e-government for civil servants using i.e. a semantic wiki. ESTRELLA was aimed at developing a formal legal knowledge interchange format (LKIF) for exchanging legal knowledge using semantic web technology. Currently we are running a national science foundation project called AGILE, targeted at the development of a design method, distributed service architecture, and support tools that enable organisations to better govern their legislation and regulation based information services within in a networked environment. Furthermore we are a partner in the FP7 project IMPACT on computational models of argumentation about policy issues. In this project we aim at applying natural language processing techniques (NLP) to multi-threaded dialogues about policies. We aim at (semi) automatic argument reconstruction, using both syntactic and semantic features of the participants’ natural language expressions. [footnotes omitted]

HT @radboud.

Lauritsen, The Lawyer’s Guide to Working Smarter with Knowledge Tools

Marc Lauritsen, Esq., of Capstone Practice Systems, has published The Lawyer’s Guide to Working Smarter with Knowledge Tools (2010). Here is the abstract:

This ground-breaking guide introduces lawyers and other professionals to a powerful class of software that supports core aspects of legal work. The author discusses how technologies like practice systems, work product retrieval, document assembly, and interactive checklists help people work smarter. If you are looking to work more effectively, this book provides a clear roadmap, with many concrete examples and thought-provoking ideas. Topics include:

• What does it mean to “work smart”?
• How can we enlist software in the substance of legal work?
• How can intelligent systems make us happier and more effective?
• Why don’t we make more use of them?
• Who are the players in the world of legal knowledge tools?
• Where is this all going?

Zurek on Conflicts in a Legal Knowledge Base

Tomasz Zurek of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University presented a paper entitled Conflicts in Legal Knowledge Base, at LIT 2010: The 3rd Workshop on Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology, held 3 May 2010, in Berlin, Germany, in conjunction with BIS 2010: The 13th International Conference on Business Information Systems. Here is the abstract of the paper:

The simulation of inference processes performed by lawyers can be seen as one way to create advisory legal system. In order to simulate such a process as accurately as possible, it is indispensable to make a clear-cut distinction between the provision itself, and its interpretation and inference mechanisms. This distinction would allow for preserving both the universal character of the provision and its applicability to various legal problems. The author’s main objective was to model a selected legal act, together with the inference rules applied, and to represent them in an advisory system, focusing on the most accurate representation of both the content and inference rules. Given that the laws which stand in contradiction prove to be the major challenge, they will constitute the primary focus of this study.

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

Call for Papers: IRIS 2010

[NOTE: Updated on 1 November 2009 to link to the workshops & tutorials.]

A call for papers, with deadline of October 31, 2009, has been issued for IRIS 2010, the Internationale Rechtsinformatik Symposion, to be held February 25-27, 2010, at the Universität Salzburg Rechtswissenschaftliche Fakultät. The conference theme is “Global Security and Proactive State in the Economic Context.” Papers are invited on the following topics, which correspond to tracks or workshops organized by the listed scholars:

• e-Government: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Roland Traunmüller, Ao. Univ.-Prof. DDr. Erich Schweighofer
• e-justice: Dr. Martin Schneider
• e-Tax & “FinanzOnline”: Ministerialrat Josef Makolm, Dipl.-Inform.Wirt Silke Weiss
• E-Procurement: Ministerialrat Josef Makolm, MMag. Claudia Bachkönig
• Knowledge-Based Process Management in Administrative Networks: Dipl.-Kffr. (FH) Angela Dovifat, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Maria Wimmer, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dimitris Karagiannis, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ralf Klischewski
• e-Democracy: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Alexander Prosser
• Advanced Legal Computer Systems: Senior Lecturer Burkhard Schafer
• Applications: Dr. Doris Liebwald
• Legal Information: Ao. Univ.-Prof. DDr. Erich Schweighofer, Adviser Albrecht Berger
• e-Commerce: RA Dr. Stefan Eder, RA Dr. Wolfgang Freund, Prof. Dr. Gerald Spindler
• Telecommunications Law: Directeur-adjoint Robert Queck
• e-Learning: Dr. Thomas Menzel, Director Anthony Antoine
• Theory of Legal Informatics, IT-Law (general parts): Ao. Univ.-Prof. DDr. Erich Schweighofer
• Legal Theory: Prof. Dr. Dunnar Duttge, Hofrat Prof. Dr. Meinrad Handstanger, Univ.-Doz. Dr. Lorenz Schulz, ao. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Michaela Strasser
• Visualization in Law: Dr. Colette R. Brunschwig
• Science Fiction and Utopia: Mag. Peter Lechner´, Dr. Peter Parycek
• Search Machines in the Legal Domain: Franz Kummer
• LEFIS (LEgal Framework for the Information Society) Workshop,
  Legal and technological questions of the Information Society: Prof. Dr. Fernando Galindo, Ao. Univ.-Prof. DDr. Erich Schweighofer
• Law of IT-Security: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Dirk Heckmann
• History of Legal Informatics: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Herbert Fiedler, Dr. Michael Bohne
• DGRI-Workshop: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Andreas Wiebe
• Electronic Law-making: Dr. Günther Schefbeck

In addition, several workshops & tutorials will be held in connection with the conference:

• Austrian-Scandinavian Workshop on Legal Informatics, February 23-24, 2010;
• Tutorial Rechtsinformatik (Computer & Recht): Die Technik, February 23, 2010;
• Tutorial Rechtsinformatik (Computer & Recht): Das Recht, February 24, 2010;
• Semianar Freie Rechtsinformation in Österreich, February 23, 2010;
• Workshop Suchmaschinen & Archivierung für Juristen, February 24, 2010;

For more information, please see the call for papers or the workshops & tutorials page.