Haydée Di Iorio et al. on Ontologies, ICTs and Law: The International Ontojuris Project

Professor Dr. Ana Haydée Di Iorio, Bibiana Beatriz Luz Clara, Esq., and Professor Dr. Roberto Giordano Leren, all of Universidad FASTA Facultad de Ingeniería, have published Ontologies, ICTs and Law: The International Ontojuris Project, in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 95-102 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

This article presents the experience of the International Ontojuris Project, modeled and developed to search and retrieve multilingual legal information based on ontologies and on the Universal Networking Language (UNL). It also presents the issue of multilingual information management, the importance of data processing from the semantic point of view and the possibility of semantic interoperability between systems, basically on Web search engines.

Haeusler et al. on Using Intuitionistic Logic as a Basis for Legal Ontologies

Professor Dr. Edward Hermann Haeusler of Pontifícia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) Departamento de Informática, Dr. Valeria de Paiva of Cuil, Inc., and Dr. Alexandre Rademaker of Escola de Pós-Graduação em Economia (EPGE) – Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), have published Using Intuitionistic Logic as a Basis for Legal Ontologies, in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 69-76 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

Classical Description Logic has been widely used as a basis for ontology creation and reasoning in many knowledge specific domains. These specific domains naturally include Legal AI. As in any other domain, consistency is an important issue for legal ontologies. However, due to its inherently normative feature, coherence (consistency) in legal ontologies is more subtle than in most other domains. Negation and subsumption play a central role in ontology coherence. An adequate intuitionistic semantics for negation in a legal domain comes to the fore when we take legally valid individual statements as the inhabitants of our legal ontology. This allows us to elegantly deal with particular situations of legal coherence, such as conflict of laws, as those solved by Private International Law analysis. This paper: (1) Briefly presents our version of Intuitionistic Description Logic, called IALC for Intuitionistic ALC (ALC being the canonical classical description logic system) (2) Discusses the jurisprudence foundation of our system, and (3) Shows how we can perform a coherence analysis of “Conflict of Laws in Space” by means of IALC. This paper reports work-in-progress on using this alternative definition of logical negation for building and testing legal ontologies and reasoning in AI.

Van Engers & Wyner on Arguing for Meaning in Legal Ontology Construction

Professor Dr. Tom van Engers of the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law and Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship have published What Do You Mean? Arguing for Meaning, in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 87-94 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

Building ontologies has been proven to be a complex issue in part because a community must commit to the conceptualization that the ontology represents. The community members must align their concepts and co-create. Arguing about a useful conceptualization is therefore an essential part of the process of designing an ontology. Logicians have developed formal argumentation theories, but have not combined formal argumentation with conceptualization. Rather, while conceptualization should play an important role in any argumentation theoretical approach, argumentation theories focus on arguments based on propositional logic and argument structures, which are not sufficient for arguing about domain conceptualization, which requires a more fine-grained logical analysis. In this paper we will explain why conceptualization plays an important role within argumentation and why argumentation support tools, especially if they use Natural Language Processing (NLP), can help in creating domain ontologies.

Schweighofer on An Ontological Representation of EU Consular Law

Professor Dr. Erich Schweighofer of Universität Wien Arbeitsgruppe Rechtsinformatik has published An Ontological Representation of EU Consular Law, in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 77-86 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

At present, EU consular law is under legal scrutiny by the European Commission. The CARE study reveals good pragmatic application but also significant implementation problems. As a site effect of our analysis, we have developed a concept of a legal ontology for knowledge description, multilingual information retrieval and semi-automatic application of consular law using a dialogue system. First experiments show the potential of this approach.

Francesconi, Marchetti, Pietramala, & Spinosa on A URN Standard for Legal Document Ontology: A Best Practice in the Italian Senate

Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi of Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica and ITTIG/CNR; Carlo Marchetti and Remigio Pietramala of The Senate of the Republic, Italy; and Pierluigi Spinosa of ITTIG-CNR, have published A URN Standard for Legal Document Ontology: A Best Practice in the Italian Senate, in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 53-68 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

Uniform Resource Names (URNs) are conceived by the Internet community for providing unambiguous and lasting identifiers of network resources, independently from their physical locations, availability and actual publication. In this paper a proposal of a URN schema for identifying sources of law at international level is presented. Moreover an implementation of such schema at the Italian Senate is shown.

Click here for more information on URN:LEX.

Bonin, Dell’Orletta, Venturi, & Montemagni: Singling out Legal Knowledge from World Knowledge: An NLP-Based Approach

Francesca Bonin, Felice Dell’Orletta, Giulia Venturi, and Simonetta Montemagni, all of Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” (ILC–CNR), have published Singling Out Legal Knowledge from World Knowledge: An NLP-Based Approach, in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 39-50 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

Ontology learning in the legal domain rises the well-known problem of epistemological promiscuity between legal entities and regulated domain instances. In this paper, we propose a new term extraction approach specifically aimed at tackling such a problem through the acquisition of a term glossary where legal terms, expressing legal concepts, and domain terms, providing a description of the regulated world knowledge, are automatically singled out. The proposed approach has been tested with promising results on a corpus of Italian European legal texts regulating the environmental domain.

Gonçalves & Quaresma on Multilingual Text Classification Through Combination of Monolingual Classifiers

Teresa Gonçalves and Professor Paulo Quaresma, both of Universidade de Évora Departamento de Informática, have published Multilingual Text Classification Through Combination of Monolingual Classifiers, in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 29-38 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

With the globalization trend there is a big amount of documents written in different languages. If these polylingual documents are already organized into existing categories one can deliver a learning model to classify newly arrived polylingual documents. Despite being able to adopt a simple approach by considering the problem as multiple independent monolingual text classification problems, this approach fails to use the opportunity offered by polylingual training documents to improve the effectiveness of the classifier. This paper proposes a method to combine different monolingual classifiers in order to get a new classifier as good as the best monolingual one having also the ability to deliver the best performance measures possible (precision, recall and F1). The proposed methodology was applied to a corpus of legal documents – from the EUR-Lex site – and was evaluated. The obtained results were quite good, indicating that combining different mono-lingual classifiers may be a promising approach to reach the best performance for each category independently of the language.

De Maat & Winkels on Suggesting Model Fragments for Sentences in Dutch Law

Emile de Maat and Professor Dr. Radboud Winkels, both of The Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam, have published Suggesting Model Fragments for Sentences in Dutch Law , in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 19-28 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

A main issue in the field of artificial intelligence and law is the translation of source of law that are written in natural language into formal models of law. This article describes a step in that transformation: the creation of models for individual sentences in a source of law. The approach uses a natural language parse to analyse the sentence, and then translates the resulting parse tree to a formal model, using both generic and law-specific attributes.

Wyner, Towards Annotating and Extracting Textual Legal Case Elements

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship has published Towards Annotating and Extracting Textual Legal Case Elements, in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 9-18 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

In common law contexts, legal cases are decided with respect to precedents rather than legislation as in civil law contexts. Legal professionals must find, analyse, and reason with and about cases drawn from a set of cases (a case base). A range of particular textual elements of a case may be relevant to query and extract. Commercial providers of legal information allow legal professionals to search a case base by keywords and meta data. However, the case base and the search tools are proprietary, of limited, non-extensible functionality, and are restricted access. Moreover, no provider applies natural language processing techniques to the cases for text analysis, XML annotation, or information acquisition. In this paper, we discuss an initial experiment in developing and applying natural language processing tools to cases to produce annotated text which can then support information extraction.

LOAIT 2010 Proceedings Available

Proceedings are available for LOAIT 2010: The 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, held 7 July 2010 in Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

The proceedings were edited by Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Daniela Tiscornia, and Piercarlo Rossi.

Abstracts will be posted here shortly.

Click here for the conference Website.