Grimmer and Stewart on Text as Data: Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Legislative Texts

Professor Dr. Justin Grimmer of Stanford University and Brandon M. Stewart of Harvard University have published Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts, forthcoming in Political Analysis.

Here is the abstract:

Politics and political conflict often occur in the written and spoken word. Scholars have long recognized this, but the massive costs of analyzing even moderately sized collections of texts have hindered their use in political science research. Here lies the promise of automated text analysis: it substantially reduces the costs of analyzing large collections of text. We provide a guide to this exciting new area of research and show how, in many instances, the methods have already obtained part of their promise. But there are pitfalls to using automated methods—they are no substitute for careful thought and close reading and require extensive and problem-specific validation. We survey a wide range of new methods, provide guidance on how to validate the output of the models, and clarify misconceptions and errors in the literature. To conclude, we argue that for automated text methods to become a standard tool for political scientists, methodologists must contribute new methods and new methods of validation.

The paper includes discussion of automated content analysis of legislative texts.

HT @treycausey

Wyner et al.: An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Laws

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and colleagues, will present a paper entitled An Empirical Approach to the Semantic Representation of Laws, at JURIX 2012: International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, being held 17-19 December 2012 at the Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam.

Here is the abstract:

To make legal texts machine processable, the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translated to formal representations that can be automatically reasoned with. The paper considers the latter, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a form that can be reasoned with by a computer, sentences must be parsed and formally represented. The paper presents the state-of-the-art in automatic translation of law to a machine readable formal representation, provides corpora, outlines some key problems, and proposes tasks to address the problems.

This paper was produced as part of Project IMPACT.

HT Dr. Adam Wyner.

Call for Proposals: ReInventLaw Dubai 2012: An ‘Un’conference on Law, Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

A call for presentation proposals — with submission deadline of 15 October 2012 — has been issued for ReInventLaw Dubai 2012: “an ‘un’conference devoted to law, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship” — to be held 10 December 2012 at Media City in Dubai.

The organizers particularly welcome presentations about innovations in legal services or legal education. Presentations can take the form of 6 Minute Ignite Style Presentations or 12 Minute “TED Style” Presentations.

Registration is free.

The event Website describes the event as follows:

ReInvent Law Dubai is an “un”conference devoted to law, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Anyone interested in the future of law or technology or entrepreneurship will want to participate. Come hear about the innovative ideas generated by the highly-engaging atmosphere of the event!

The event is being sponsored by The ReInventLaw Laboratory at Michigan State University College of Law, and is modeled on the LawTechCamp London 2012 event held last summer.

For more information, please see the ReInventLaw Dubai 2012 Website.

HT @computational.

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.

ReInvent Law Dubai 2012: Unconference on Law, Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

ReInvent Law Dubai 2012: Unconference on Law, Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship will be held 10 December 2012 at Dubai Knowledge Village, Dubai, UAE, according to an announcement at Computational Legal Studies.

The event’s organizers will be Professor Dr. Daniel Martin Katz and Professor Renee Newman Knake, both of the Michigan State University College of Law and its new ReInvent Law Laboratory.

According to the event brochure:

ReInvent Law Dubai is an (un)conference focusing on law, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. Building upon the success of the recent London event, leaders in the fields of law, technology and beyond will come together to share ideas about innovation in the delivery of legal services.

This event is Free, Open and Participatory. Anyone can propose a topic. Entrepreneurs, new media/technology enthusiasts, legal professionals, social networkers, and those curious about future innovation in law and technology will want to attend.

The Michigan State University College of Law Graduate Program at MSU Dubai is a primary sponsor.

For more information, please see the announcement.

HT @computational.

June 29: LawTechCamp London

LawTechCamp London 2012 — “a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals” — will be held 29 June 2012 in London, England, UK.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lawtechcamplondon.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets — in .csv format — from the event.

Click here for the conference program.

A notable characteristic of this event is that it gathers together in one place individuals from most of the different subgroups of the legal informatics community.

The event’s organizers include:

• Daniel Martin Katz, Michigan State University College of Law
• Renee Newman Knake, Michigan State University College of Law
• Monica Goyal, owner and CEO of MyLegalBriefcase.com
• Lisa Webley, University of Westminster Law School
• John Flood, University of Westminster Law School
• David Allison, The College of Law
• Jon Harman, The College of Law 

HT @reneeknake.

Program Posted for LawTechCamp London 2012

The program has been posted for LawTechCamp London 2012 — “a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media and technology enthusiasts and legal professionals” — to be held 29 June 2012 in London, England, UK.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lawtechcamplondon.

A notable characteristic of this event is that it gathers together in one place individuals from most of the different subgroups of the legal informatics community.

The event’s organizers include:

• Daniel Martin Katz, Michigan State University College of Law
• Renee Newman Knake, Michigan State University College of Law
• Monica Goyal, owner and CEO of MyLegalBriefcase.com
• Lisa Webley, University of Westminster Law School
• John Flood, University of Westminster Law School
• David Allison, The College of Law
• Jon Harman, The College of Law 

HT @reneeknake.

Wyner on Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science has published Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 39-41.

Here is the abstract:

Legislation and regulations are expressed in natural language. Machine-readable forms of the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translation to a logic. The paper considers the latter form, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a machine-readable logic, sentences must be parsed and semantically translated. Manual translation is time and labour intensive, usually involving narrowly scoping the rules. While automated translation systems have made significant progress, problems remain. The paper outlines systems to automatically translate legislative clauses to a semantic representation, highlighting key problems and proposing some tasks to address them.

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.

Wyner and Peters On Rule Extraction from Regulations

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science, and Dr. Wim Peters of the University of Sheffield Department of Computer Science, have posted their paper entitled On Rule Extraction from Regulations, to be presented at JURIX 2011: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, 14-16 December 2011, in Vienna, Austria.

Here is the abstract:

Rules in regulations such as found in the US Federal Code of Regulations can be expressed using conditional and deontic rules. Identifying and extracting such rules from the language of the source material would be useful for automating rulebook management and translating into an executable logic. The paper presents a linguistically-oriented, rule-based approach, which is in contrast to a machine learning approach. It outlines use cases, discusses the source materials, reviews the methodology, then provides initial results and future steps.

The empirical component of the study involves application of the method and model to text from 21 Code of Federal Regulations part 610, section 40 (21 C.F.R. 610.40).