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

Interview with Núria Casellas: Legally Linked: Linked Open Data Principles Applied To Code Of Federal Regulations

An interview with Dr. Núria Casellas of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School (LII), entitled Legally Linked: Linked Open Data Principles Applied To Code Of Federal Regulations, has been published at semanticweb.com.

In this interview, Dr. Casellas discusses the application of Linked Data in Title 21 of LII’s new version of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations. In that title, users can search for “brand names for drugs (such as Tylenol), and receiv[e] the generic name for the drug (acetaminophen) as a suggested term.” LII plans to incorporate “definitions, obligations and vocabularies, and product information to enhance search and retrieval, and also visualization of the information.”

Dr. Casellas also describes a plan to “link[] materials from the Drug Bank open data drug and drug target database, which has been transformed into RDF and made available as a SPARQL endpoint, to Title 21 in the CFR, and vice vers[a].” The article notes that LII “is developing a SKOS-based thesaur[us] derived from the terms used in the CFR, and extracting definitions and obligations.” LII also plans to include in its CFR metadata “product codes from sources such as the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).”

For more information, please see the complete article.

Legal Informatics Papers at STOG 2012: Workshop on Semantic Technologies for Open Government

Several legal informatics papers were presented at STOG 2011: Workshop on Semantic Technologies for Open Government, held 28 October 2011 in Florence, Italy, in conjunction with the e-Challenges 2011 conference:

Here is the workshop program:

• Marta Poblet, UAB Institute of Law and Technology, Spain: Mobile Phones, Images, Hashtags: Mobile Activism and Public Participation;
• Antoni Roig, IDT (Institute of Law And Technology), Spain: Towards a Global eDiscovery Standard;
• Pompeu Casanovas, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain: Dialogue and data. A relational model for governance and law;
• Jorge Gonzalez-Conejero, Institute of Law and Technology, Spain: Online Mediation Consumer Tools: MediWeb and MediApp;
• Meritxell Fernández-Barrera, Cersa, CNRS-Paris2, France: A contextualised ontology of the consumer law: bridging specialised and common-sense knowledge through contextual schemes;
• Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna, Italy: Beyond Information Toward Open Data;
• Enrico Francesconi, ITTIG-CNR, Italy: Thesaurus Mapping for Promoting Semantic Interoperability of European Public Services;
• Tommaso Agnoloni, CNR , Italy: Towards a European Legal Data Cloud.

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

Call for Papers: SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts

[NOTE: This post has been updated to reflect the extended deadline of 19 February 2012. HT Simonetta Montemagni.]

A call for papers — with extended submission deadline of 19 February 2012 — has been issued for SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, to be held 27 May 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

SPLeT 2012 is being held in conjunction with LREC 2012: The Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.

Papers for SPLeT 2012 are invited on the following topics:

• Construction, extension, merging, customization of legal language resources, e.g. terminologies, ontologies
• Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts
• Semantic annotation of legal textual corpora
• Legal text processing
• Machine learning of legal texts
• Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing
• Legal thesauri mapping
• Automatic Classification of legal documents
• Logical analysis of legal language
• Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism
• Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments
• Dialogue protocols for argumentation
• Legal argument ontology
• Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural language
• Controlled language systems for law

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

Calls for Papers: Workshops @ ICAIL 2011

Calls for papers, with diverse submission deadlines, have been issued for the workshops at ICAIL 2011: The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law; the workshops are scheduled to be held 6 and 10 June 2011, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

DESI IV: Workshop on Setting Standards for Searching Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings, 6 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 1 April 2011: Research papers;
• 22 April 2011: Position papers.

Workshop on Agent Model-Based Reasoning in Law, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 14 March 2011.

Computational Law: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 20 April 2011.

AI & Evidential Inference, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• TBA

AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• 31 March 2011.

Coherence 2011: Artificial Intelligence, Coherence, and Judicial Reasoning, 10 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 15 April 2011: Abstracts;
• 3 June 2011: Full papers.

HT JURIX.

Sartor et al. on Approaches to Legal Ontologies: Theories, Domains, Methodologies

Approaches to Legal Ontologies: Theories, Domains, Methodologies (Springer 2011), a collection of scholarly articles on legal ontologies, has been published.

The volume is edited by Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID, Professor Dr. Pompeu Casanovas of the Institute of Law & Technology (IDT) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Maria Angela Biasiotti of ITTIG/CNR, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of the European University Institute Department of Law.

This is the first volume in Springer’s new Law, Governance, and Technology Series, edited by Professors Casanovas and Sartor.

Some of the articles in this volume are based on papers originally presented at the Workshop on Approaches to Legal Ontologies, held 9-10 December 2008, at European University Institute Department of Law, in Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

Here are the contents:

1. Introduction: Theory and Methodology in Legal Ontology Engineering: Experiences and Future Directions / Pompeu Casanovas, Giovanni Sartor, Maria Angela Biasiotti, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
2. The Legal Theory Perspective: Doctrinal Conceptual Systems vs. Computational Ontologies / Meritxell Fernández-Barrera and Giovanni Sartor
3. Empirically Grounded Developments of Legal Ontologies: A Socio-Legal Perspective / Pompeu Casanovas, Núria Casellas, and Joan-Josep Vallbé
4. A Cognitive Science Perspective on Legal Ontologies / Joost Breuker and Rinke Hoekstra
5. Social Ontology and Documentality / Maurizio Ferraris
6. The Case-Based Reasoning Approach: Ontologies for Analogical Legal Argument / Kevin D. Ashley
7. A Complex-System Approach: Legal Knowledge, Ontology, Information and Networks / Pierre Mazzega, Danièle Bourcier, Paul Bourgine, Nadia Nadah, and Romain Boulet
8. The Multi-Layered Legal Information Perspective / Guido Boella and PierCarlo Rossi
9. Legal Ontologies: The Linguistic Perspective / Maria Angela Biasiotti and Daniela Tiscornia
10. A Legal Document Ontology: The Missing Layer in Legal Document Modelling / Monica Palmirani, Luca Cervone, and Fabio Vitali
11. From Thesaurus Towards Ontologies in Large Legal Databases / Ángel Sancho Ferrer, Carlos Fernández Hernández, and José Manuel Mateo Rivero
12. The Computational Ontology Perspective: Design Patterns for Web Ontologies / Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti, and Eva Blomqvist
13. A Learning Approach for Knowledge Acquisition in the Legal Domain / Enrico Francesconi
14. Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science: The Legal Perspective / Roberta Ferrario, Nicola Guarino, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
15. Legal Multimedia Ontologies and Semantic Annotation
    for Search and Retrieval / Jorge González-Conejero

Call for Papers: Workshop on Applying Human Language Technology to the Law

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 31 March 2011 — has been issued for AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, a workshop to be held 10 June 2011, at ICAIL 2011: The Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

[If the call for papers or the workshop Website is down, click here for the cached version.]

Papers are invited on the following topics:

The workshop will focus on extraction of information from legal text, representations of legal language (ontologies and semantic translations), and dialogic aspects. While information extraction and retrieval are crucial areas, the workshop emphasises syntactic, semantic, and dialogic aspects of legal information processing.

Building legal resources: terminologies, ontologies, corpora.
Ontologies of legal texts, including subareas such as ontology acquisition, ontology customisation, ontology merging, ontology extension, ontology evolution, lexical information, etc.
Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts.
Semantic annotation of legal texts.
Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing.
Legal thesauri mapping.
Automatic Classification of legal documents.
Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism.
Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments.
Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural language.
Controlled language systems for law.
Name matching and alias detection.
Dialogue protocols and systems for legal discussion.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

JURIX 2010 Slides Available

Slides are now available for many papers given at JURIX 2010: The 23rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, held 16-17 December 2010 at the University of Liverpool Computer Science Department, in Liverpool, England, UK.

HT JURIX Blog.

JURIX 2010

The final program has been posted for JURIX 2010: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 15-17 December 2010, at the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, in Liverpool, England, UK.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix.

Click here for papers from the 15 December workshop: Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules 2010.

Click here for information about the invited speakers, who include John L. Sheridan of The National Archives (UK).

Click here for information for conference participants.

We wish our colleagues who are organizing, presenting at, or attending JURIX 2010 a very successful and rewarding conference.

JURIX 2010: Accepted Papers

Accepted papers have been announced for JURIX 2010: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 16-17 December 2010, at the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, in Liverpool, England, UK.

Invited speakers for the conference have also been announced.