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.

Bellucci, Macfarlane, & Zeleznikow on How Information Technology Can Support Family Law and Mediation

Dr. Emilia Bellucci of Victoria University, Deborah Macfarlane, and Professor John Zeleznikow of Victoria University, presented a paper entitled How Information Technology Can Support Family Law and Mediation, 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:

In Australia, before a divorcing couple can have their case heard by the Family Court, they must undertake mediation. Thus it is useful to develop information technology tools to support negotiation and mediation in family law. Most negotiation support systems focus upon integrative bargaining. In doing so, they tend to ignore issues of fairness. In Australian Family Law, the interests of the children, as opposed to those of their parents/guardians, are paramount. We investigate the use of providing BATNAs and integrative bargaining in providing family mediation decision support. The discussion is highlighted with examples taken from the domain of Australian Family Law.

The technology discussed in the paper appears also to be discussed in the new monograph: Arno R. Lodder and John Zeleznikow, Enhanced Dispute Resolution Through the Use of Information Technology (2010).

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

Kuhn on A Framework for Graph-based Parsing of German Private Law Decisions

Florian Kuhn of Universität Potsdam Department Linguistik presented a paper entitled A Framework for Graph-based Parsing of German Private Law Decisions, 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:

We present a work in progress report of our research on automatically analyzing German court decisions. For accessibility to information retrieval and text summarization processing, we show concepts of a parsing framework dealing with linguistic features of this genre. To cover these features, we first developed a description language inferred from content structure analysis presented before. The main aspect of this paper is the presentation of a graph-based parsing framework concept. The parser will be able to label the content structure of German court decisions.

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

Bueno et al. on The Ontojuris Project: A Multilingual Legal Document Search System Based on a Graphical Ontology Editor

Tânia C. D. Bueno, of instituto i3G, Dr. Hugo C. Hoeschl of Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia e Gestão do Conhecimento and instituto i3G, and César R. K. Stradiotto of instituto i3G, presented a paper entitled Ontojuris Project: A Multilingual Legal Document Search System Based on a Graphical Ontology Editor, 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 Ontojuris project consists of a multilingual system for legal information retrieval (IR) associated with an ontology editor. The system accepts queries in one language, and allows IR based on similarity of documents, written in one of several languages. The multilingual ontology editor works with the concept of Universal Words (UW´s). The UW´s are universal representations of things and objects, and it is developed inside the Universal Networking Language Project (UNL), allowing query expansion in a multilingual way. Query expansion can improve the searching process required by user, including additional terms which have similar meaning to the original query. In this study, we proposed a new expansion method which is based on domain ontology and UW´s, to achieve better performance for a multilingual IR. So, the Ontojuris project aims to facilitate access to information on legislation in the area of Intellectual Property Law, Consumer Rights and Electronic Law in the consortium formed by researches in Brazil, Chile, Spain and Argentina.

The authors appear to have presented a related paper, entitled Ontology Graphical Editor for Multilingual Document Search System, at FQAS 2009: The 8th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, held 26-28 October 2009 in Roskilde, Denmark. Here is the abstract of the FQAS 2009 paper:

These research studies compare two methods for ontology creation and their corresponding tools. The main objective of this work is the building of a graphical editor for ontology construction, based on software usability criteria. This comparison shows which methods used in previous tools will remains in the new editor, and what new tools can be developed for enhancing the ontology management made using the old one.

The use of graphics and diagrams helps in the discovery of new knowledge, from information received from various sources, being the Internet or databases. This new type of editor improves the visualization of relations between the terms of ontologies and thereby improves the efficiency of its construction for commercial application systems. In addition, this form of information representation, based on these diagrams, will allow information systems based on ontologies to identify – automatically – concepts, hidden elements, the flow time between the events of cause and consequences and the meaning of relations between the captured information.

The Ontojuris project has the purpose given above, and it is described on this paper. The project consists of a multilingual information system for legal information retrieval associated with an ontology editor, called Knowledge Engineering Suite. The system accepts queries in one language, and allows information retrieval based on similarity of documents, written in one of several languages. The multilingual ontology editor works with the concept of Universal Words (UW’s). The UWs are universal representations of things and objects, and it is developed inside the UNL Project (UNL being an acronym for Universal Networking Language) and allows the query expansion in a multilingual way. Query expansion can improve searching process, required by user, by including additional terms which have similar meaning to the original query. In this study, we proposed a new expansion method which is based on domain ontology and UWs, to achieve better performance for a multilingual information retrieval. So, the Ontojuris project aims to facilitate access to information on legislation in the area of Intellectual Property Law, Consumer Rights and Electronic Law in the consortium formed by researches in Brazil, Chile, Spain and Argentina.

Click here for the full text of the FQAS 2009 paper on SpringerLink (access requires purchase or subscription).

For the full text of the LIT 2010 paper, please contact the authors.

Boonchom & Soonthornphisaj on Legal Ontology Construction Using ATOB Algorithm

Vi-sit Boonchom and Nuanwan Soonthornphisaj presented a paper entitled Legal Ontology Construction Using ATOB Algorithm, 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:

Ontology is a knowledge representation technique that can be applied in many areas such as information retrieval. Ontology construction is a tedious job and time consuming task for law experts. This paper proposes a system framework called ATOB that can automatically generate a seed ontology and extend the ontology using ant colony algorithm. Two ontologies are created by ATOB system which are succession law ontology and family law ontology. We compare the performance of these ontologies with the ontologies manually created by law experts in our previous system (TLOE) and found that ATOB provides satisfactory result.

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

Kubiak et al. on Mediated Signatures: Towards Undeniability of Digital Data in Technical and Legal Framework

Przemyslaw Kubiak of Politechnika Wrocławska, and colleagues, presented a paper entitled Mediated Signatures – Towards Undeniability of Digital Data in Technical and Legal Framework, 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:

We present an approach different from the classical framework of qualified electronic signatures that seem to offer much better properties regarding usability, costs, risk level as well as security in technical sense. Our approach is based on mediated signatures and chaining mechanisms that replace time stamping services.

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

Boer, van Engers, & Winkels on the Traceability of the Implementation of Legal Rules in Public Administration

Dr. Alexander Boer, Professor Dr. Tom van Engers, and Professor Dr. Radboud Winkels, all of the Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam, presented a paper entitled Traceability of the Implementation of Legal Rules in Public Administration, 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:

While isomorphism of knowledge representation has been recognized as important, particularly to maintenance in legal knowledge representation, the requirements of the maintenance process in general get less attention. Traceability from knowledge resources used in the organization to the sources of law used in their production is a central maintenance issue in administrative organizations. This paper explores a mediating knowledge representation for reconstruction of traces to sources of law and to implementation knowledge resources, that should be helpful for analysis of the impact of changing sources of law.

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

Peruginelli & Francesconi on Semantic Interoperability Among Thesauri: A Challenge in the Multicultural Legal Domain

Dr. Ginevra Peruginelli of ITTIG/CNR and the University of Perugia Faculty of Law and Professor Enrico Francesconi of Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica and ITTIG/CNR, presented a paper entitled Semantic Interoperability Among Thesauri: A Challenge in the Multicultural Legal Domain, 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:

In the last few years crucial issues like cross-language legal information retrieval, document classification, legal knowledge discovery and extraction have been considered in theory and in practice. The availability of services allowing cross-language and cross-collection retrieval is a growing necessity. This paper focuses on the need to develop solutions for automatic, language-independent procedures to provide interoperability between mono/poly-lingual thesauri at national and European levels. This will guarantee sustainable and scalable services enabling to manage the multilingual complexity of the European Union legal context to be used for cross-language and cross-collection legal information retrieval. Wider use of the service can also be envisaged as support to legal translation services, as well as in general to promote integration and sharing of widespread and heterogeneous legal resources, providing new market opportunities for stakeholders to exploit the economic potential of public sector information in a multilanguage environment.

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

Abstracts Available for LIT 2010: The 3rd Workshop on Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology

Abstracts are available — see under “Monday, 3 May,” the entries for “LIT Workshop” on right screen, and hold cursor over each paper title to see its abstract, or display the page source — for the papers presented 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.

Call for Papers: LIT 2010

[NOTE: Updated on 17 February 2010 to note that the submission deadline has been extended to 2 March 2010.]

A call for papers, with extended submission deadline of 2 March 2010, 7 February 2010 has been issued for LIT 2010: The 3rd Workshop on Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology, to be held 4 or 5 May 2010, in Berlin, Germany, in conjunction with BIS 2010: The 13th International Conference on Business Information Systems. Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Information extraction & categorization of legal documents
• Computational models for legal reasoning
• Information Technology & Dispute Resolution
• Information Technology & Crime Prevention
• Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining in Law
• Knowledge management in the legal domain
• Legal argumentation
• Legal aspects of IT
• Legal discourse modeling and legal reasoning
• Legal electronic agents
• Legal Expert Systems
• Legal ontologies – creation, use & lifecycles
• Legal reasoning and its computer representation
• Natural language processing in law
• Alternative & online Dispute Resolution
• Question answering retrieval for law and governmental services
• Risk management & trust in law
• Semantic Web technologies in law and e-government
• Semantic indexing of legal documents
• Specific legal domain[ applications] (systems in civil, tax, commercial, insurance law)
• Specialized knowledge representation and logics for law
• Text mining and knowledge extraction in law
• Validation of legal knowledge”

For more information, please see the call for papers.