Oldfather et al. on Automated Content Analysis, Court Opinions, and Legal Scholarly Methodology

Professor Chad M. Oldfather of Marquette University School of Law, Professor Dr. Joseph P. Bockhorst of the University of Wisconsin Madison Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Brian P. Dimmer, Esq., have published Triangulating Judicial Responsiveness: Automated Content Analysis, Judicial Opinions, and the Methodology of Legal Scholarship, Florida Law Review, 64, 1189-1242 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

The increasing availability of digital versions of court documents, coupled with increases in the power and sophistication of computational methods of textual analysis, promises to enable both the creation of new avenues of scholarly inquiry and the refinement of old ones. This Article advances that project in three respects. First, it examines the potential for automated content analysis to mitigate one of the methodological problems that afflicts both content analysis and traditional legal scholarship — their acceptance on faith of the proposition that judicial opinions accurately report information about the cases they resolve and courts’ decisional processes. Because automated methods can quickly process large amounts of text, they allow for assessment of the correspondence between opinions and other documents in the case, thereby providing a window into how closely opinions track the information provided by the litigants. Second, it explores one such novel measure — the responsiveness of opinions to briefs — in terms of its connection to both adjudicative theory and existing scholarship on the behavior of courts and judges. Finally, it reports our efforts to test the viability of automated methods for assessing responsiveness on a sample of briefs and opinions from the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Though we are focused primarily on validating our methodology, rather than on the results it generates, our initial investigation confirms that even basic approaches to automated content analysis provide useful information about responsiveness, and generates intriguing results that suggest avenues for further study.

Guissé et al. : From Regulatory Texts to BRMS: Guiding the Acquisition of Business Rules

Abdooulaye Guissé, Professor Dr. François Lévy, and Professor Dr. Adeline Nazarenko, all of Université Paris-Nord Laboratoire d’informatique (LIPN), will present a paper entitled From regulatory texts to BRMS: How to guide the acquisition of business rules? at RuleML 2012: International Symposium on Rules, Montpellier, France, August 27-29(30), 2012.

Here is the abstract:

This paper tackles the problem of rule acquisition, which is critical for the development of BRMS. The proposed approach assumes that regulations written in natural language (NL) are an important source of knowledge but that turning them into formal statements is a complex task that cannot be fully automated. The present paper focuses on the first phase of this acquisition process, the normalization phase that aims at transforming NL statements into controlled language (CL), rather than on their formalization into an operational rule base. We show that turning a NL text into a set of self-sucient and independent CL rules is itself a complex task that involves some lexical and syntactic normalizations but also the restoration of contextual information and of implicit semantic entities to get a set of self-sucient and unambiguous rule statements. We also present the SemEx tool that supports the proposed acquisition methodology based on the selection of the relevant text fragments and their progressive and interactive transformation into CL rule statements.

SemEx is:

a semantic explorer platform designed to assist business analysts in building a base of candidate business rules out of a policy document.

JURIX 2010 Slides Available

Slides are now available for many papers given at JURIX 2010: The 23rd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, held 16-17 December 2010 at the University of Liverpool Computer Science Department, in Liverpool, England, UK.

HT JURIX Blog.

JURIX 2010

The final program has been posted for JURIX 2010: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 15-17 December 2010, at the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, in Liverpool, England, UK.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #jurix.

Click here for papers from the 15 December workshop: Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules 2010.

Click here for information about the invited speakers, who include John L. Sheridan of The National Archives (UK).

Click here for information for conference participants.

We wish our colleagues who are organizing, presenting at, or attending JURIX 2010 a very successful and rewarding conference.

JURIX 2010: Accepted Papers

Accepted papers have been announced for JURIX 2010: The International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, to be held 16-17 December 2010, at the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, in Liverpool, England, UK.

Invited speakers for the conference have also been announced.

Stede & Kuhn on Identifying the Content Zones of German Court Decisions

Professor Dr. Manfred Stede and Florian Kuhn, both of Universität Potsdam Department Linguistik, have published Identifying the Content Zones of German Court Decisions, in Business Information Systems Workshops: BIS 2009 International Workshops, Poznan, Poland, April 27-29, 2009, Revised Papers (2009).

The paper was originally presented at LIT 2009: The 2nd Workshop on Legal Informatics and Legal Information Technology, held 28 April 2009 in Poznan, Poland.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

A central step in the automatic processing of court decisions is the identification of the various content zones, i.e., breaking up the document into functionally independent areas. We assembled a corpus of German court decisions and argue that this genre belongs to the class of semi-structured text documents. Currently, we are implementing zone identification by means of a set of recognition rules, following up on our earlier experiences with a different genre (film reviews).

Kuhn on A Description Language for Content Zones of German Court Decisions

Florian Kuhn of Universität Potsdam Department Linguistik will present a paper entitled A Description Language for Content Zones of German Court Decisions (for the full text of the paper, click here for the conference proceedings in PDF and scroll down to the page numbered 1) at SPLeT 2010: The 3rd Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, to be held 23 May 2010 in Malta.

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

Here is the abstract of the paper:

We present a work-in-progress report of our research on automatically analyzing German court decisions. A description language for linguistic features in content zones of a court decision is introduced, developed to cover linguistic features of German court decisions. We motivated our research with significant text characteristics found in our corpus of private law decisions and show how we map these characteristics to elements of the description language. Finally, further research aspects are mentioned.