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

Palmirani, Paschke, et al.: Slides of LegalRuleML Tutorial at Jurix 2012

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani of the University of Bologna has posted slides of the LegalRuleML Tutorial given at Jurix 2012 on 17 December 2012, in Amsterdam.

The slides include a general tutorial by Prof. Palmirani and colleagues, and a use case by Professor Dr. Adrian Paschke of Freie Universität Berlin entitled LegalRuleML for Legal Reasoning in Patent Law.

Click here for the program of the tutorial.

LegalRuleML is a markup language, based on RuleML, for modeling legal rules.

LegalRuleML is currently being developed by the OASIS LegalRuleML Technical Committee, which is co-chaired by Professor Palmirani and Dr. Guido Governatori of NICTA.

Palmirani et al., eds.: AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems: Papers from AICOL III

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani, Professor Dr. Ugo Pagallo, Professor Dr. Pompeu Casanovas, and Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor, have edited a new book entitled AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems – Models and Ethical Challenges for Legal Systems, Legal Language and Legal Ontologies, Argumentation and Software Agents (Springer, 2012).

The book contains revised selected papers from International Workshop AICOL-III, Held as Part of the 25th IVR Congress, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, August 15-16, 2011.

HT Professor Palmirani

November 26 Call for Papers Deadline: Legal Resources from Text to Rules: Jurix Workshop

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 26 November 2012 — has been issued for the Jurix 2012 workshop entitled Legal Resources from Text to Rules, to be held 20 December 2012 in Amsterdam.

The workshop is being held in conjunction with JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 17-20 December 2012 at Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

Here are details of the workshop:

The time is ripe for investigating the connections between the representation of legal XML texts and their formalization as legal rules.

For years these two communities have pursued their goals separately, but now emerging XML-based standards oriented both to legal documents (Akoma Ntoso, CEN Metalex, national XML standards, etc.) and to legal rules (LKIF, RuleML, RIF, SWRL, LegalRuleML, etc.) justify the possibility to combine techniques and foster their concrete application in the society (compliance, eGov services, legislative drafting, policy making applications, digital legal libraries, etc.).

This workshop aims to examine the relationship between legal computable ontologies as bridges from legal concepts and their legal texts and legal rules (predicates). Hybrid platform where ontologies are used to support legal reasoning and to create bidirectional dialogues with legal knowledge bases are part within the workshop scope.

Questions we will try to address:

• Are the statuses of legal XML standards fixed? What are the next steps?
• Are legal rules autonomous or they need to link their evidences to the text for support?
• Are multiple interpretations of a legal text possible without affecting its representations as legal XML documents?
• What are the roles of the legal ontologies and of semantic web (especially Linked Data) technologies in this scenario?

Proponents: Monica Palmirani, Fabio Vitali, Enrico Francesconi, Tom van Engers, Radboud Winkels

Selected papers will be published in the AICOL IV volume by the end of 2013, after a double peer-review process.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Palmirani

Applications Invited for LAST-JD Joint International Doctoral (Ph.D.) Degree in Law, Science & Technology

A call for applications has been issued for the LAST-JD Joint International Doctoral (Ph.D.) Degree in Law, Science & Technology, for 2013-2014.

The application deadline is 1 February 2013.

According to the program description:

The Joint International Doctoral Degree in “Law, Science and Technology” is an interdisciplinary integrated doctorate, designed to address new challenges in legal, socio-ethical and technical domains arising from the information society and newly emerging technologies.

The program includes a legal informatics track.

The complete announcement appears below.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

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LAST-JD call for applications: deadline February 1, 2013
http://www.last-jd.eu/
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Want to be part of the excellent ERASMUS MUNDUS DOCTORAL Program?
Want to earn a joint Ph.D. title awarded by three European universities?
Want to join the new interdisciplinary program in Law, Science and Technology?
Want to acquire cutting-edge skills with which to compete on a surer footing in the information society?

Don’t miss the DEADLINE for APPLYING for the JOINT INTERNATIONAL DOCTORAL DEGREE IN LAW, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY.
Find the application form online at http://www.last-jd.eu/?page_id=65

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LAST-JD Ph.D. Program
JOINT INTERNATIONAL DOCTORAL DEGREE IN LAW, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Online at http://www.last-jd.eu/
===========================================

The Joint International Doctoral Degree in Law, Science and Technology is an interdisciplinary integrated program designed to address the new legal, socio-ethical, and technical challenges posed by the information society and the newly emerging technologies.

The program covers three different research fields with its curricula:
* Bioethics and Biolaw, which looks at the legal and ethical issues arising in connection with advances in biology and medicine;
* ICT Law, addressing the legal risks and opportunities in ICT; and
* Legal Informatics, an area of informatics that takes law as its subject matter, developing techniques with which to manage the legal domain.

This program promotes European excellence, innovation, and competitiveness in such critical legal and ethical fields as the regulation of privacy, genomics and biobanks, e-government, e-health and e-commerce, the right of free speech on the Internet and intellectual property rights (IPR) with respect to the new technologies. Moreover, the program furthers the design of new software to support the legal profession, including systems based on the explicit representation of laws and regulations in a computable form, as well as systems for checking compliance with international, European, and national legal frameworks and systems in AI & Law.
Details online at http://www.last-jd.eu/?page_id=46

Full Partners
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University of Bologna, CIRSFID (coordinator) – Italy
University of Turin – Italy
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (IDT) – Spain
Mykolas Romeris University, e-Business Center – Lithuania
University of Luxembourg – Luxembourg
University of Tilburg (TILT) – Netherlands

Associate Partners
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Hannover Medical School and University of Hannover, CELLS – Germany
University of Barcelona, Bioethics and Law Observatory (OBD) – Spain
University of Piemonte Orientale – Italy
University of Pittsburgh, AI&LAW Lab – USA
University of Renmin, Intellectual Property Academy – China
European Genetics Foundation – Italy
Fraunhofer FOKUS – Germany
ITTIG, Istituto di teoria e tecnica dell’Informazione giuridica – Italy
Instituto de Investigacion en Inteligencia Artificial, IIIA – Spain
Nexa – Italy
NICTA – Australia

Industrial Partners
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AUGEOS – Italy
ASCAMM – Spain
CELI – Italy
IBM – Europe
NEXEN – Italy
NOMOTIKA – Italy
VICOMTECH – Spain
S21sec- Spain
SUNRISE VALLEY – Lithuania
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Palmirani, Ognibene and Cervone on Legal Rules, Text and Ontologies Over Time

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani, Tommaso Ognibene, and Luca Cervone, all of CIRSFID, University of Bologna, presented a paper entitled Legal Rules, Text and Ontologies Over Time, at RuleML2012@ECAI Challenge, held 27-29 August 2012 in Montpellier, France.

Here is the abstract:

The current paper presents the “Fill the gap” project that aims to design a set of XML standards for modelling legal documents in the Semantic Web over time. The goal of the project is to design an information system using XML standards able to store in an XML-native database legal resources and legal rules in an integrated way for supporting legal knowledge engineers and end-users (e.g., public administrative officers, judges, citizens).

According to Professor Palmirani, this paper won an award as one of the two best demo papers of the RuleML2012 Challenge.

Click here for the complete proceedings of RuleML2012@ECAI Challenge and Doctoral Consortium.

HT Professor Palmirani

Updated Version of LegalRuleML Tutorial Released

An updated version of a tutorial about LegalRuleML — an extension of the RuleML markup language, applied to legal rules — has been posted by the OASIS LegalRuleML Technical Committee.

For more information on the work of the committee, please see their Website and their email archive.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani

Lesmo, Mazzei, Palmirani, and Radicioni on an NLP System for Extracting Legal Modificatory Provisions

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche «Antonio Cicu» and CIRSFID, and Professor Dr. Leonardo Lesmo, Dr. Alessandro Mazzei, and Dr. Daniele P. Radicioni, all of Universita’ di Torino Dipartimento di Informatica, have published TULSI: an NLP system for extracting legal modificatory provisions, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

In this work we present the TULSI system (so named after Turin University Legal Semantic Interpreter), a system to produce automatic annotations of normative documents through the extraction of modificatory provisions. TULSI relies on a deep syntactic analysis and a shallow semantic interpreter that are illustrated in detail. We report the results of an experimental evaluation of the system and discuss them, also suggesting future directions for further improvement.

Doctoral Consortium: RuleML 2012 @ ECAI

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 25 June 2012 — has been issued for the Doctoral Consortium at RuleML 2012 @ ECAI: The 6th International Symposium on Rules, to be held 27 August 2012, in Montpellier, France.

The consortium is being held in conjunction with ECAI 2012: The 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Here is a description of the Doctoral Consortium and of the paper requirements:

The RuleML 2012 Doctoral Consortium is an initiative of the International Symposium on Rules, RuleML, to attract and promote Ph.D. research in the area of Rules and Markup Languages. The doctoral symposium offers to students a close contact with leading experts on the field, as well as the opportunity to present and discuss their ideas in a dynamic and friendly setting.

The accepted thesis descriptions will be presented to an interested audience and subject to discussion with a panel of senior researchers, and we expect submissions on any (but not limited to) of this year’s RuleML2012@ECAI topics.

Students are invited to submit an original description of their work addressing the following aspects:

• A clear formulation of the research question.
• An identification of the significant problems in the field of research.
• An outline of the current knowledge of the problem domain, as well as the state of existing solutions.
• A presentation of any preliminary ideas, the proposed approach and the results achieved so far.
• A sketch of the applied research methodology.
• A description of the Ph.D. project’s contribution to the problem solution.
• A discussion of how the suggested solution is different, new, or better as compared to existing approaches to the problem.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani.

Palmirani and Vitali on Legislative Drafting Systems

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche «Antonio Cicu» and CIRSFID, and Professor Dr. Fabio Vitali of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Informazione, have published Legislative Drafting Systems, in Elizabeth Buie and Dianne Murray (Eds.), Usability in Government Systems: User Experience Design for Citizens and Public Servants (pp. 133-151). Morgan Kaufmann / Elsevier, 2012.

Here is the abstract:

This chapter discusses concrete experiences with the problems of introducing XML-based tools (and in particular document editors) in the legal drafting offices of a number of national and local parliaments, and the conclusions we were able to draw, especially regarding the role of traditions and the resilience of preexisting roles and job descriptions in accepting and integrating such tools.