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]

Gros et al. on Ethics and Authority Sharing for Autonomous Armed Robots

Florian Gros and Catherine Tessier of ONERA, and Thierry Pichevin of CREC, Ecoles de Saint-Cyr Coetquidan, presented a paper entitled Ethics and Authority Sharing for Autonomous Armed Robots (scroll down), at RDA2 2012: the First Workshop on Rights and Duties of Autonomous Agents, held 28 August 2012 in Montpellier, France.

Click here for slides of the presentation.

Here is the abstract:

The goal of this paper is to review several ethical questions that are relevant to the use of autonomous armed robots and to authority sharing between such robots and the human operator. First, we discern the commonly confused meanings of morality and ethics. We continue by proposing leads to answer some of the most common ethical questions raised by literature, namely the autonomy, responsibility and moral status of autonomous robots, as well as their ability to reason ethically. We then present the possible advantages that authority sharing with the operator could provide with respect to these questions.

The principal ethical rules addressed in the paper are the Laws of War and related legal rules.

Click here for the complete proceedings of RDA2 2012: the First Workshop on Rights and Duties of Autonomous Agents.

Click here for abstracts and slides of presentations at RDA2 2012: the First Workshop on Rights and Duties of Autonomous Agents.

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

Full text papers have been posted for SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, being held 27 May 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Here is the list of papers:

• Giulia Venturi: Design and Development of TEMIS: a Syntactically and Semantically Annotated Corpus of Italian Legislative Texts
• Guido Boella, Luigi Di Caro, Llio Humphreys, Livio Robaldo: Using Legal Ontology to Improve Classification in the Eunomos Legal Document and Knowledge Management System
• Antonio Lazari, Mª Ángeles Zarco-Tejada: JurWordNet and FrameNet Approaches to Meaning Representation: a Legal Case Study
• Lorenzo Bacci, Enrico Francesconi, Maria Teresa Sagri: A Rule-based Parsing Approach for Detecting Case Law References in Italian Court Decisions
• Adam Wyner, Wim Peters: Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware
• Paulo Quaresma: Legal Information Extraction ← Machine Learning Algorithms + Linguistic Information
• Adam Wyner: Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts
• Felice Dell’Orletta, Simone Marchi, Simonetta Montemagni, Barbara Plank, Giulia Venturi: The SPLeT–2012 Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts
• Giuseppe Attardi, Daniele Sartiano and Maria Simi: Active Learning for Domain Adaptation of Dependency Parsing on Legal Texts
• Alessandro Mazzei, Cristina Bosco: Simple Parser Combination
• Niklas Nisbeth, Anders Søgaard: Parser combination under sample bias

Talley and O’Cane on A Protocol for Tokenizing Force Majeure Clauses in M&A Agreements

Professor Eric L. Talley and Drew O’Cane, both of University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) and the Berkeley Center for Law, Business, and the Economy, have posted The Measure of a MAC: A Quasi-Experimental Protocol for Tokenizing Force Majeure Clauses in M&A Agreements, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

We develop a protocol for using a well known lawyer-coded data set on Material Adverse Change/Effect clauses in acquisitions agreements to tokenize and calibrate a machine learning algorithm of textual analysis. Our protocol, built on both regular expression (RE) and latent semantic analysis (LSA) approaches, is designed to replicate, correct, and extend the reach of the hand-coded data. Our preliminary results indicate that both approaches perform well, though a hybridized approach improves predictive power even more. We employ Monte Carlo simulations show that our results generally carry over to out-of-sample predictions. We conclude that similar approaches could be used much more broadly in empirical legal scholarship, most specifically in the study of transactional documents in business law.

Mochales and Moens on Argumentation Mining in ECHR Texts

Rachel Mochales Palau and Professor Dr. Marie-Francine Moens, both of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Afdeling Informatica, have published Argumentation Mining, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:

Argumentation mining aims to automatically detect, classify and structure argumentation in text. Therefore, argumentation mining is an important part of a complete argumentation analyisis, i.e. understanding the content of serial arguments, their linguistic structure, the relationship between the preceding and following arguments, recognizing the underlying conceptual beliefs, and understanding within the comprehensive coherence of the specific topic. We present different methods to aid argumentation mining, starting with plain argumentation detection and moving forward to a more structural analysis of the detected argumentation. Different state-of-the-art techniques on machine learning and context free grammars are applied to solve the challenges of argumentation mining. We also highlight fundamental questions found during our research and analyse different issues for future research on argumentation mining.

The techniques discussed in the paper are illustrated in part through their application to a corpus of texts issued by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Call for Papers: SIRE 2011: SIGIR 2011 Information Retrieval for E-Discovery Workshop

A call for papers — with submission deadlines of 13 May 2011 for research papers and 3 June 2011 for position papers — has been posted for SIRE 2011: SIGIR 2011 Information Retrieval for E-Discovery Workshop, to be held 28 July 2011 in Beijing, China.

The workshop will be collocated with SIGIR 2011: The 34th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• Distributed search of large heterogeneous enterprise information systems, including corporate intranets, archival and backup repositories, cloud-based storage, etc.
• High-recall search of large collections, including those with high densities of relevant documents
• Supervised learning of classifiers for responsiveness, privilege and other factors of interest (sometimes referred to in e-discovery as predictive coding)
• IR techniques that leverage the characteristics of specific types of business records (email, instant messages, voice mail, file systems, etc.)
• Clustering, link analysis, and other methods for discovering structure in large collections, including detection of duplicate documents
• Process design for human-in-the-loop review and exploitation of large data sets, including measurement of inter-reviewer consistency, active learning, etc.
• Evaluation design, including sampling strategies, estimation of confidence intervals, and reusability of large test collections

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Jack G. Conrad.

NELIC 2011: New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference

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

NELIC 2011: The New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference, will be held 15 April 2011, at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, in Berkeley, California, USA.

According to the announcement, invited speakers will address the following topics:

• “Quantitative Legal Prediction“: such as applying “machine learning” and “natural language processing” to develop “statistical model[s]” of “judicial decision-making”;
• “Legal Financing and Securitization“
• “The Future of Legal Automation“
• “Legal Interfaces and User Experiences“: including implications for access “to the legal system.”

As of today, the speakers include Joshua Walker of Lex Machina; and Daniel Martin Katz of the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems.

For registration or more information, please see the conference announcement.