Chung, Mowbray, and Greenleaf on Searching Legal Information in Multiple Asian Languages

Philip Chung of the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, Professor Andrew Mowbray of University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Law, and Professor Dr. Graham Greenleaf of the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, have published Searching Legal Information in Multiple Asian Languages, forthcoming in Legal Information Management.

Here is the abstract:

In this article the Co-Directors of the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) explain the need for an open source search engine which can search simultaneously over legal materials in European languages and also in Asian languages, particularly those that require a ‘double byte’ representation, and the difficulties this task presents. A solution is proposed, the ‘u16a’ modifications to AustLII’s open source search engine (Sino) which is used by many legal information institutes. Two implementations of the Sino u16A approach, on the Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII), for English and Chinese, and on the Asian Legal Information Institute (AsianLII), for multiple Asian languages, are described. The implementations have been successful, though many challenges (discussed briefly) remain before this approach will provide a full multi-lingual search facility.

New on VoxPopuLII: Vibert and Anderson on JurisPedia

Dr. Hughes-Jean Vibert of Institut für Rechtsinformatik, Universität des Saarlandes, and Kerry Anderson of the African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII), have posted JurisPedia: Perspectives, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, the authors describe JurisPedia, the free, international, multilingual, crowdsourced legal encyclopedia, and how it applies principles of crowdsourcing to legal information in many countries. The post describes the development of the English-language version of JurisPedia and its hosting by the Southern African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII) and then the African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII).

The authors describe the motivating principles of JurisPedia — particularly the principle of shared law — the potential tension between inclusiveness and quality control, and the service’s Creative Commons license. The post tells of the recent addition to JurisPedia of Google Custom Search functionality enabling searching of the laws of 80 countries. Finally, the authors discuss how JurisPedia provides legal information in multiple languages to individuals in particular nations, and how JurisPedia can ease ordinary citizens’ access to the laws of most countries of the world.

For more information, please see the complete post.

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.

Call for Papers: CIKM 2011

A call for papers has been issued for CIKM 2011: The 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, to be held 24-28 October 2011 in Glasgow, Scotland, UK.

Dr. Peter Jackson of Thomson Reuters is scheduled to speak at the conference’s Industry Event.

Here are the submission deadlines:

• Workshop Proposals Due: March 28, 2011;
• Tutorial Proposals Due: April 26, 2011;
• Full Papers: Abstracts Due: May 17, 2011;
• Full Papers: Complete Papers Due: May 24, 2011;
• Posters Due: May 30, 2011;
• Demonstration Papers Due: June 26, 2011;
• Workshop Papers Due: June 29, 2011.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

Databases

• Access methods and indexing
• Authorization, data privacy and security
• Concurrency control and recovery
• Data quality, provenance, adaptability and reusability
• Data exchange, integration, evolution and migration
• Database languages and models (e.g., fuzzy data, probabilistic databases, meta-data management)
• Domain-specific databases (multi-media, scientific, spatial, temporal, text)
• Dynamic aspects of databases (updates, views, real-time data, sensor data, active databases, data streams)
• Mobile, parallel and distributed data management (including cloud computing)
• Novel/advanced applications
• Query processing, optimization and performance
• Semantic Web and ontologies
• Semi-structured data processing, XML filtering and routing
• String databases, blogs and social search
• Systems, platforms, middleware and experiences
• Workflow, Web services and Web Service Composition

Information Retrieval

• Aggregated search, Enterprise search, Desktop search
• Personalised and collaborative search
• Cross-language retrieval, Multilingual retrieval, Machine translation for IR
• Distributed IR, Peer to peer IR
• Domain-specific IR: genomic, legal, mobile, patents, …
• Evaluation, Test collections, Crowdsourcing for IR evaluation
• Foundations of IR: Theory, Formal models
• HCIR, User Interfaces, Interactive IR, User models, User studies
• Language technologies for IR (NLP, IE, Summarization, QA, …)
• Machine Learning for IR
• Multimedia IR: audio, speech, image, video, and cross-media
• Semi-structured information retrieval, Semantic search
• System Architectures, Scalability and Efficiency
• Web IR and Social media search
• Other topics related to IR (Adverserial IR, Advertising, Privacy, Text Mining, etc.)

Knowledge Management

• Advertising and optimization
• Classification and clustering
• Data pre- and post-processing
• Domain-specific and cross-domain knowledge management
• Evaluation measures, methods and frameworks
• Information Extraction
• Information Filtering and Recommender Systems
• Knowledge and privacy (e.g., privacy-preserving data publishing and mining)
• Knowledge synthesis and visualization
• Large-scale statistical techniques
• Link and graph Mining
• Mining the usage, consumption and production of resources
• Semantic techniques
• Temporal, Spatial and Ubiquitous Data Mining
• Text Mining
• Web and Social Knowledge Management

Industry Research Track

• Industrial Practice and Experience
• Technology for Developing Regions

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Call for Papers: ECEG 2011: European Conference on eGovernment

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 25 November 2010 — has been issued for ECEG 2011: The 11th European Conference on e-Government, to be held 16-17 June 2011 in Ljubljani, Slovenia.

Here are the legal-informatics topics, from the topics about which papers are invited:

• Challenges to e-Government:
• Interoperability;
• Language issues;
• Identity Management – including Authentication, Trust and Privacy;
• Semantics of transactions in e-Government, definitions and implementations
• e-Voting
• e-Democracy:
• ICT and the case of deliberative democracy;
• Using Blogs and Wikis to enhance participation;
• Citizen trust in online participation and dialogue;
• The design of audience-specific consultative processes;
• Deciding the correct balance between online and offline citizen/government, citizen/citizen interactions;
• Exploiting the learning and communicative potential of emerging online tools and new media forms (games, blogs, wiki, G3 mobile communications)
• Measuring e-Government/Economics of e-Government
• Legal, agency, trust and governance issues in e-Government
• Additional topics:
• Interoperability Frameworks (National, Transnational);
• Knowledge Management/Intellectual capital in local/national government;
• e-I: Intelligent use of systems in government;
• Information management strategies within the public sector;
• Decision support systems;
• Single European information space;
• Document management systems;
• Open Access and e-Government;
• Mobile Government;
• e-Procurement

For a complete list of topics, or for more information, please see the call for papers.

Call for Proposals: 2010 EU Criminal Justice Action Grants: Interconnection of Criminal Records, & e-Justice

[NOTE: In addition to the call for proposals described on this post, readers may be interested in the call for proposals for 2010 e-Justice Action Grants, designated JLS/2010/JPEN/AG/EJ.]

A call for proposals — with submission deadline of 15 September 2010 — has been issued for Criminal Justice Action Grants, with the designation JLS/2010/JPEN/AG, by the EU Directorate General for Justice, Freedom, and Security.

Proposals are invited on the following legal informatics topics:

Interconnection of criminal records

“National and transnational projects concerning the interconnection of national criminal record IT systems within the EU presented by national central authorities [...]. Exchange of information about convictions in the EU is to be facilitated through the creation of a computerised system of exchange of information ECRIS-European Criminal Records Information System. Projects should have one or more of the following objectives:”

• “Appropriate modernisation and computerisation of national criminal records IT systems where necessary for European interconnection: this could involve preparatory/feasibility studies, project development, purchase of computer software.
• Dedicated training of personnel working for national criminal record authorities, e.g. training on the functioning of their newly updated national information system, as well as specific training for those in charge of dealing at European level with other criminal record systems/foreign authorities;
• Projects aimed at facilitating the exchange of information extracted from criminal records between Member States’ central authorities for purposes other than criminal proceedings.
• Projects aimed at preparing the future implementation of ECRIS. These may include studies, preparatory meetings, translation of documents, technical and legal support to improve mutual understanding of criminal records information and technical exchanges.”

European e-Justice

“A separate call for European e-Justice with specific conditions is foreseen and has already been published. However, European e-Justice is also one of the priorities of this general call under the Criminal Justice Programme in 2010. In this general call, non-profit organisations are encouraged to participate in the development of European e-Justice. Their projects should help develop the use of electronic tools in the context of justice, taking into consideration national developments on the basis of exchange of best practice.

“All projects should aim to provide practical tools to enable better access to crossborder justice for EU citizens. [...]“

Proposals are invited on the following topics:

• “Support to multilinguism through translation of legal online sources of information
• Development of multilingual tools necessary to find a legal professional in another Member State
• Development of multilingual tools necessary to communication or exchange of data between legal practitioners
• Support to workshops relating to exchange of best practices in the field of e-Justice and dissemination of information on the results of existing national or cross-border projects
• Development of secure paperless procedures, between citizens and legal professions or amongst legal professions
• Creation or interconnection of national or European-level databases with national legislation and/or case law of the Member States relevant for the application of mutual recognition instruments or instruments approximating substantive criminal law.”

For more information, please see the call for proposals.

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.

Call for Papers: SPLeT 2010: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts

[NOTE: Updated on 9 February 2010 to note that the submission deadline has been extended to 17 February 2010 (HT Dr. Simonetta Montemagni).]

A call for papers, with extended submission deadline of 17 February 2010 10 February 2010, has been issued for SPLeT 2010: The 3rd Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, to be held 23 May 2010 in Malta. A PDF version of the call for papers is also available.

The workshop is part of LREC 2010: The 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “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
• Legal text processing
• 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. Simonetta Montemagni and Dr. Adam Wyner.

Call for Papers: Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web

A call for papers, with submissions deadline of 21 February 2010, has been issued for The 1st Workshop on the Multilingual Semantic Web, to be held April 26 or 27, 2010, in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. The workshop is being held in conjunction with WWW 2010: The 19th International World Wide Web Conference.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• models for the integration of linguistic information with ontologies
• architectures and infrastructure for a truly multilingual Semantic Web
• models for multilinguality in knowledge representation, in particular OWL and RDF(S)
• localization of ontologies to multiple languages, incl. label translation, multilingual terms
• adaptation of (multilingual) lexicons to ontologies
• automatic integration of (multilingual) lexicons with ontologies
• multilingual & cross-lingual ontology-based information extraction & ontology population
• multilingual aspects of semantic search & querying of knowledge repositories
• multilinguality and linked data (generation, querying, visualization & presentation)
• multilingual aspects of ontology verbalization
• ontology learning across languages

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Peruginelli, Multilinguismo e sistemi di accesso all’informazione giuridica

Professor Ginevra Peruginelli, Esq., a Researcher at the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council (ITTIG-CNR), has published Multilinguismo e sistemi di accesso all’informazione giuridica (2009). Here is the abstract:

“Il volume mostra un quadro esaustivo dei problemi del multilinguismo giuridico e delle soluzioni che si stanno sperimentando anzitutto a livello europeo ma anche a livello mondiale.”

Here is the table of contents:

• Il principio del multilinguismo
• I sistemi di accesso multilingue
• Metodi e tecniche per l’accesso multilingue
• La ricerca giuridica multilingue
• Uno sguardo agli strumenti e ai sistemi di ricerca giuridica multilingue
• Conclusioni e prospettive
• Appendice
• Alcuni dizionari giuridici multilingue: dizionari giuridici unidirezionali;
• Alcuni dizionari giuridici multilingue: dizionari giuridici pluridirezionali.

Here is a detailed table of contents.