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

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

Awad et al.: An Iterative Approach to Synthesize Business Process Templates from Compliance Rules

Professor Dr. Ahmed Awad of Cairo University Faculty of Computers and Information, and colleagues, have published An iterative approach to synthesize business process templates from compliance rules [paywalled version ; preprint version] forthcoming in Information Systems, 37(8), 714–736 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

Companies have to adhere to compliance requirements. The compliance analysis of business operations is typically a joint effort of business experts and compliance experts. Those experts need to create a common understanding of business processes to effectively conduct compliance management. In this paper, we present a technique that aims at supporting this process. We argue that process templates generated out of compliance requirements provide a basis for negotiation among business and compliance experts. We introduce a semi-automated and iterative approach to the synthesis of such process templates from compliance requirements expressed in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). We show how generic constraints related to business process execution are incorporated and present criteria that point at underspecification. Further, we outline how such underspecification may be resolved to iteratively build up a complete specification. For the synthesis, we leverage existing work on process mining and process restructuring. However, our approach is not limited to the control-flow perspective, but also considers direct and indirect data-flow dependencies. Finally, we elaborate on the application of the derived process templates and present an implementation of our approach.

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]

Oldfather et al. on Automated Content Analysis, Court Opinions, and Legal Scholarly Methodology

Professor Chad M. Oldfather of Marquette University School of Law, Professor Dr. Joseph P. Bockhorst of the University of Wisconsin Madison Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Brian P. Dimmer, Esq., have published Triangulating Judicial Responsiveness: Automated Content Analysis, Judicial Opinions, and the Methodology of Legal Scholarship, Florida Law Review, 64, 1189-1242 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

The increasing availability of digital versions of court documents, coupled with increases in the power and sophistication of computational methods of textual analysis, promises to enable both the creation of new avenues of scholarly inquiry and the refinement of old ones. This Article advances that project in three respects. First, it examines the potential for automated content analysis to mitigate one of the methodological problems that afflicts both content analysis and traditional legal scholarship — their acceptance on faith of the proposition that judicial opinions accurately report information about the cases they resolve and courts’ decisional processes. Because automated methods can quickly process large amounts of text, they allow for assessment of the correspondence between opinions and other documents in the case, thereby providing a window into how closely opinions track the information provided by the litigants. Second, it explores one such novel measure — the responsiveness of opinions to briefs — in terms of its connection to both adjudicative theory and existing scholarship on the behavior of courts and judges. Finally, it reports our efforts to test the viability of automated methods for assessing responsiveness on a sample of briefs and opinions from the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Though we are focused primarily on validating our methodology, rather than on the results it generates, our initial investigation confirms that even basic approaches to automated content analysis provide useful information about responsiveness, and generates intriguing results that suggest avenues for further study.

Loukis et al.: Policy-Related Knowledge Management in Parliaments

Professor Dr. Euripides Loukis, Professor Dr. Yannis Charalabidis, and Alexandros Xenakis, all of the University of the Aegean Department of Information and Telecommunication Systems, presented a paper entitled Policy-Related Knowledge Management in Parliaments Based on an Extension of IBIS Framework, at tGov 2012: Transforming Government Workshop, held 8-9 May 2012, at Brunel University, West London, England, UK. Here is the abstract:

In Parliaments there are huge amounts of knowledge concerning public policies for addressing social problems and needs, which is however contained in numerous long textual documents (e.g. drafts, laws, justification reports, discussions’ minutes, experts’ reports), and it cannot be exploited to a good extent. Its full exploitation necessitates an appropriate structured representation of it. In this paper, initially we analysed the legislation formulation process of the Greek Parliament and its main documents from a public policy perspective, focusing on the knowledge they contain on social problems and needs, and on public interventions (e.g. regulations, programmes, services provision, infrastructure building) for addressing them. Based on the conclusions drawn from this analysis we developed a methodology for the codification, representation and management of the policy-related knowledge of Parliaments, which is founded on a well established product of CSAV research, the Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) framework. A first application of this methodology has been made for the whole set of documents produced for the Law on the ‘Contracts of Voluntary Cohabitation’ passed by the Greek Parliament. It was then evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative techniques based on the ‘Technology Acceptance Model’ (TAM). The evaluation concluded that the above representation/codification includes to a good extent the substantial elements of the policy-related knowledge contained in the Parliamentary documents, and it is understandable by the users. At the same time it revealed weaknesses that lead us to the development of an extension of the IBIS framework in order to achieve a better representation of this knowledge.

Boyd, Hoffman, et al. on Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints

Professor Dr. Christina L. Boyd of the State University of New York (SUNY) – Department of Political Science, Professor David A. Hoffman of the Temple University School of Law and the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School, and colleagues, have posted Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints.

This article has been published in: Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 10(2), 253-287 (2013):
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jels.12010

Here is the abstract:

This project empirically explores civil litigation from its inception by examining the content of civil complaints. We utilize spectral cluster analysis on a newly compiled federal district court dataset of causes of action in complaints to illustrate the relationship of legal claims to one another, the broader composition of lawsuits in trial courts, and the breadth of pleading in individual complaints. Our results shed light not only on the networks of legal theories in civil litigation but also on how lawsuits are classified and the strategies that plaintiffs and their attorneys employ when commencing litigation. This approach permits us to lay the foundations for a more precise and useful taxonomy of federal litigation than has been previously available, one that, after the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal (2009), has also arguably never been more relevant than it is today.

This study is notable for several reasons, including that Computational Legal Studies founders Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito commented on the statistical methodology used in the study, and that the study uses government data made public through RECAP, the open government data project developed by Harlan Yu, Stephen Schultze, and Timothy B. Lee, all of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Further, this study exemplifies the scholarly use of open government data predicted by David Robinson, Harlan Yu, and Ed Felten, in their influential article, Government Data and the Invisible Hand.

HT @freemoth.

Mill: US Code Citation Extraction Library in JavaScript, with Node API

Eric Mill of Sunlight Labs has posted two new sets of software to GitHub:

• US Code Citation Extraction library in JavaScript
• Minimal Node.js API over US Code Citation Extraction library in JavaScript

According to Eric, posting this code constitutes “the tiny, humble foundation of a public project to extract legal citations from blocks of text large and small.”

For more information, contact Eric Mill.

HT @konklone.

DGT-TM-2011, Parallel Corpus of All EU Legislation in Translation, Expanded to Include Data from 2004-2010

The DGT Multilingual Translation Memory of the Acquis Communautaire: DGT-TM — a parallel corpus of all European Union legislation, called the Acquis Communautaire, translated into all 22 languages of the EU nations — has been expanded to include EU legislation from 2004-2010, according to an April 2012 announcement on the DGT-TM Website. The updated corpus is called DGT-TM-2011.

The new content comes from the EU Official Journal Series L, 2004-2010.

According to the announcement, DGT-TM-2011 is the largest parallel corpus in the world, and is intended to be used for the following purposes:

• training automatic systems for statistical machine translation (SMT);
• producing monolingual or multilingual lexical and semantic resources such as dictionaries and ontologies;
• training and testing multilingual information extraction software;
• checking translation consistency automatically;
• testing and benchmarking alignment software (for sentences, words, etc.).

The DGT-TM-2011 should be a valuable resource for legal informatics and legal linguistics research and development.

For more information, please see:

• The official announcement;
• A new paper about DGT-TM-2011: Steinberger, R., et al. (2012). DGT-TM: A freely Available Translation Memory in 22 Languages, to be presented at LREC 2012;
• A new post about the DGT-TM-2011: Super-European language translation corpus, at Corpus Linguistics.

HT @moximer.

Wyner on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship has posted Note on Workshop on FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling Projects, on his blog, Language Logic Law Software.

The EU-funded Project IMPACT : Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis, was featured at the Workshop. Click here for more information about Project IMPACT.

Here is introductory information about the post:

On January 27th, 2012, I attended a workshop in Sheffield, United Kingdom on current FP7 eGovernance and Policy Modelling projects. This was an opportunity to hear from and meet participants in other projects, largely based in the United Kingdom. The information (somewhat augmented) about the workshop is below. My colleagues in the IMPACT Project, Professor Ann Macintosh and Neil Benn, presented our side of the story.

Aims

• To close the gap between the availability of cutting edge R & D in eGovernance and Policy Modelling and its take-up in local and central government. It will bring the new governance projects and those about to exploit their results into a collaborative environment.
• To link the projects currently creating the best practice of the future with initiatives seeking to share current best practice, thus assisting with “exploitation” of the new initiatives.
• To briefly assess how these initiatives may be of global benefit by examining how China may be encouraged to take a short cut to sustainable development and looking at joint approaches to China.

For more information, please see the complete post.