Legal Document Cloud

There has been some discussion recently of a legal document cloud: a version, specifically for legal texts, of DocumentCloud, the online document repository for journalists that uses OpenCalais to perform semantic analysis and annotation of documents.

[Here is a recent example of the use of DocumentCloud to annotate a legal text, in this instance the U.S. federal district court decision, in the National Security Letters case.]

As he was leaving the Open Data Day DC 2013 hackathon, Alan deLevie tweeted about a legal document cloud.

In a Twitter discussion of this topic at the end of Open Data Day DC 2013, Jonathan Stray said that Docracy is a legal document cloud service, with version control. [Docracy has just opened a beta version of a new technology called The Document Genome, that performs legal document comparison, summarization, and versioning, for a number of applications including compliance.]

Stray also suggested using the Associated Press’s Overview platform to do classification (tagging) of legal document collections.

Then, on March 5, 2013, Alan deLevie posted a readme for a proposed legal document cloud, on GitHub. Here are excerpts of the readme:

What?

I’m trying to build a set of standardized tools for one basic task: Looping through lots of law-related text, processing it, and saving the results. [...]

Why?

Under the hood, you’ll get parallelism and remote code execution from IronWorker. This has several advantages over running this code on your laptop:

Performance. Splitting up the work into chunks is an obvious win.

Reliability. In the middle of a large processing job, and the power goes out and your laptop battery is about to die? No worries. Your job continues to run, with results stored safely.

Curation. The legal informatics/open government/open data communities are coalescing in a great way. Many standalone scripts are emerging for specific text processing tasks. I’d like this repo to be a central place where anyone can quickly make use of these great tools. Batteries included will lower barriers to entry.

Standardization. The legal informatics community could gain by adopting a standard project structure.

Verification. This builds off of point 4. Need to show how you arrived at a certain set of findings? This could be done in maybe ~20 lines of code.

I envision something as simple as installing a Ruby gem, adding some API keys, mixing and matching text processors to suit your needs, then running your corpus through in a simple loop. [...]

A related resource: in October 2012 Elmer Masters of CALI described his proposal for a new cloud-based repository of court decisions, called CourtCloud.

If you know of other information regarding a legal document cloud, please share it in the comments to this post.

[NOTE: Edited on 18 March 2013 to clarify that the idea of a legal document cloud was not discussed aloud at Open Data Day DC 2013 but was instead mentioned on Twitter by Alan deLevie as he was leaving Open Data Day DC 2013. HT @adelevie here and here.]

Francesconi on a Semantic Model for Legal Resources: Annotation and Reasoning over Normative Provisions

Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi of Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica and ITTIG/CNR has posted Semantic Model for Legal Resources: Annotation and Reasoning over Normative Provisions, under review at Semantic Web Journal.

Here is the abstract:

A Semantic Web approach in the legal domain is presented in terms of a model of normative provisions and related axioms. In particular, relation between provisions are identified and modelled by introducing design patterns able to describe Hohfeldian legal fundamental relations and by a query approach able to deal with relations between provisions instances. Examples of semantic annotation of legal textual resources using RDF/OWL standards, as well as advanced access and reasoning facilities over provisions using SPARQL, are shown. The main benefit of the approach is represented by the ability to keep the complexity of the problem within a description logic computational tractability.

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.

Calls for Papers: Workshops @ ICAIL 2011

Calls for papers, with diverse submission deadlines, have been issued for the workshops at ICAIL 2011: The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law; the workshops are scheduled to be held 6 and 10 June 2011, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

DESI IV: Workshop on Setting Standards for Searching Electronically Stored Information in Discovery Proceedings, 6 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 1 April 2011: Research papers;
• 22 April 2011: Position papers.

Workshop on Agent Model-Based Reasoning in Law, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 14 March 2011.

Computational Law: A Bridge Towards the Business Rules, 6 June 2011. Deadline:

• 20 April 2011.

AI & Evidential Inference, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• TBA

AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, 10 June 2011. Deadline:

• 31 March 2011.

Coherence 2011: Artificial Intelligence, Coherence, and Judicial Reasoning, 10 June 2011. Deadlines:

• 15 April 2011: Abstracts;
• 3 June 2011: Full papers.

HT JURIX.

Sartor et al. on Approaches to Legal Ontologies: Theories, Domains, Methodologies

Approaches to Legal Ontologies: Theories, Domains, Methodologies (Springer 2011), a collection of scholarly articles on legal ontologies, has been published.

The volume is edited by Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID, Professor Dr. Pompeu Casanovas of the Institute of Law & Technology (IDT) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Maria Angela Biasiotti of ITTIG/CNR, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of the European University Institute Department of Law.

This is the first volume in Springer’s new Law, Governance, and Technology Series, edited by Professors Casanovas and Sartor.

Some of the articles in this volume are based on papers originally presented at the Workshop on Approaches to Legal Ontologies, held 9-10 December 2008, at European University Institute Department of Law, in Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

Here are the contents:

1. Introduction: Theory and Methodology in Legal Ontology Engineering: Experiences and Future Directions / Pompeu Casanovas, Giovanni Sartor, Maria Angela Biasiotti, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
2. The Legal Theory Perspective: Doctrinal Conceptual Systems vs. Computational Ontologies / Meritxell Fernández-Barrera and Giovanni Sartor
3. Empirically Grounded Developments of Legal Ontologies: A Socio-Legal Perspective / Pompeu Casanovas, Núria Casellas, and Joan-Josep Vallbé
4. A Cognitive Science Perspective on Legal Ontologies / Joost Breuker and Rinke Hoekstra
5. Social Ontology and Documentality / Maurizio Ferraris
6. The Case-Based Reasoning Approach: Ontologies for Analogical Legal Argument / Kevin D. Ashley
7. A Complex-System Approach: Legal Knowledge, Ontology, Information and Networks / Pierre Mazzega, Danièle Bourcier, Paul Bourgine, Nadia Nadah, and Romain Boulet
8. The Multi-Layered Legal Information Perspective / Guido Boella and PierCarlo Rossi
9. Legal Ontologies: The Linguistic Perspective / Maria Angela Biasiotti and Daniela Tiscornia
10. A Legal Document Ontology: The Missing Layer in Legal Document Modelling / Monica Palmirani, Luca Cervone, and Fabio Vitali
11. From Thesaurus Towards Ontologies in Large Legal Databases / Ángel Sancho Ferrer, Carlos Fernández Hernández, and José Manuel Mateo Rivero
12. The Computational Ontology Perspective: Design Patterns for Web Ontologies / Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti, and Eva Blomqvist
13. A Learning Approach for Knowledge Acquisition in the Legal Domain / Enrico Francesconi
14. Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science: The Legal Perspective / Roberta Ferrario, Nicola Guarino, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
15. Legal Multimedia Ontologies and Semantic Annotation
    for Search and Retrieval / Jorge González-Conejero

Call for Papers: Workshop on Applying Human Language Technology to the Law

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 31 March 2011 — has been issued for AHLTL 2011: Applying Human Language Technology to the Law, a workshop to be held 10 June 2011, at ICAIL 2011: The Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

[If the call for papers or the workshop Website is down, click here for the cached version.]

Papers are invited on the following topics:

The workshop will focus on extraction of information from legal text, representations of legal language (ontologies and semantic translations), and dialogic aspects. While information extraction and retrieval are crucial areas, the workshop emphasises syntactic, semantic, and dialogic aspects of legal information processing.

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.
Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing.
Legal thesauri mapping.
Automatic Classification of legal documents.
Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism.
Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments.
Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural language.
Controlled language systems for law.
Name matching and alias detection.
Dialogue protocols and systems for legal discussion.

For more information, please see the call for papers.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

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.

Call for Papers: CIKM 2010: ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

Calls for workshop papers, tutorials, and demonstrations have been issued for CIKM 2010: The 19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, to be held 26-30 October 2010, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The submission deadlines are:

• 24 June 2010: Demos;
• 30 June 2010: Workshop papers;
• 15 July 2010: Tutorials.

Proposals are invited in the following areas:

• Databases;
• Information retrieval;
• Knowledge management.

Click here for a detailed list of topics.

For more information, please see the calls for workshop papers, tutorials, and demonstrations.

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.