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).

Zurek & Kruk on a Legal Advisory System for the Agricultural Tax Law

Dr. Tomasz Zurek of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Institute of Computer Science, and Emil Kruk of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Institute of Administration and Public Law, have published Legal Advisory System for the Agricultural Tax Law, 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:

The authors of this study attempted to develop an advisory tool functioning in the scope of the Agricultural Tax Act. The focus of the authors in this study was on presenting the outcome of the efforts connected with building the ontology which would allow for representing individual cases, and dealing with cases not expressly regulated by law. This study will also outline the structure and concept of the system in question.

Bianchi et al. on A Support System for the Analysis and the Management of Complex Ruling Documents

Mario Bianchi of the Italian National Centre for ICT in the Public Administrations (CNIPA), and colleagues, have published A Support System for the Analysis and the Management of Complex Ruling Documents, 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:

This paper reports the experiment conducted for the development and assessment of a new software tool allowing the automatic discovery of correlations in large legislative frameworks.

The system, named NavigaNorme, has been mainly designed to support experts of the Legal domain involved in the simplification of the Italian normative framework for all levels of the Public Administration. In fact, the most relevant functionality in NavigaNorme is the identification, given a paragraph in a selected norm, of those paragraphs (in the same norm and in other norms) that should be considered in
trying to reduce the number of norms being in force or in drafting a new law.

NavigaNorme relies on a search engine that combines classical Information retrieval techniques with some ad-hoc strategies introduced to increase the precision of the retrieval by exploiting implicit information extracted from the logical structure of Legal and normative texts.

The effectiveness of NavigaNorme has been mainly measured in terms of precision, through an assessment procedure that involved experts of the Legal domain.

El Kharbili & Stolarski on Building-Up a Reference Generic Regulation Ontology: A Bottom-Up Approach

Marwane El Kharbili of Université du Luxembourg Computer Science and Communications Research Unit and Piotr Stolarski of the Poznan University of Economics Department of Information Systems have published Building-Up a Reference Generic Regulation Ontology: A Bottom-Up Approach, 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:

The aim of this paper is to develop a Reference Normative Ontology. This generic ontology is being developed in order to allow modeling policy-based regulations. Such modeling is for creating models of norms and rules and can be used by a larger framework for compliance checking. The modeling of regulations using this ontology can be showcased for semantic business process management. Our study is based on 3 domain case-specific ontologies describing norms and behavioral standards within Web portals. The analysis of those concrete, small ontologies allows building an abstract, generic ontology which is destined to cover core aspects most of other specific regulation examples. This ontology is designed to grow by integrating additional case-specific normative documents and serve as the core component of a generic regulation modeling ontology.

Zeleznikow on The Need to Incorporate Justice into Negotiation Support Systems

Professor John Zeleznikow of Victoria University has published The Need to Incorporate Justice into Negotiation Support Systems, 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:

Over the past twenty five years there has been a movement towards resolving legal disputes through mediation and negotiation rather than litigation. Perceived benefits of this move towards Alternative Dispute Resolution include disputants having more control of the dispute and potential solutions, reduced costs and speedier decision making. If Alternative Dispute Resolution becomes the norm for resolving legal disputes, then we must ensure that the negotiation support systems that we develop utilize legally fair paradigms. But how can we develop measures, or at the very least principles, for the development of legally just? Through an examination of bargaining in the shadow of the law and principled negotiation we suggest principles which when applied, will encourage fairness and justice in the development of negotiation support systems. Such principles include transparency, bargaining in the shadow of the law and the need for discovery. We also illustrate the pitfalls of using such principles.

Zurek on Conflicts in a Legal Knowledge Base

Tomasz Zurek of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University presented a paper entitled Conflicts in Legal Knowledge Base, 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 simulation of inference processes performed by lawyers can be seen as one way to create advisory legal system. In order to simulate such a process as accurately as possible, it is indispensable to make a clear-cut distinction between the provision itself, and its interpretation and inference mechanisms. This distinction would allow for preserving both the universal character of the provision and its applicability to various legal problems. The author’s main objective was to model a selected legal act, together with the inference rules applied, and to represent them in an advisory system, focusing on the most accurate representation of both the content and inference rules. Given that the laws which stand in contradiction prove to be the major challenge, they will constitute the primary focus of this study.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the author.

Bellucci, Macfarlane, & Zeleznikow on How Information Technology Can Support Family Law and Mediation

Dr. Emilia Bellucci of Victoria University, Deborah Macfarlane, and Professor John Zeleznikow of Victoria University, presented a paper entitled How Information Technology Can Support Family Law and Mediation, 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:

In Australia, before a divorcing couple can have their case heard by the Family Court, they must undertake mediation. Thus it is useful to develop information technology tools to support negotiation and mediation in family law. Most negotiation support systems focus upon integrative bargaining. In doing so, they tend to ignore issues of fairness. In Australian Family Law, the interests of the children, as opposed to those of their parents/guardians, are paramount. We investigate the use of providing BATNAs and integrative bargaining in providing family mediation decision support. The discussion is highlighted with examples taken from the domain of Australian Family Law.

The technology discussed in the paper appears also to be discussed in the new monograph: Arno R. Lodder and John Zeleznikow, Enhanced Dispute Resolution Through the Use of Information Technology (2010).

For the full text of the paper, please contact the authors.

Kuhn on A Framework for Graph-based Parsing of German Private Law Decisions

Florian Kuhn of Universität Potsdam Department Linguistik presented a paper entitled A Framework for Graph-based Parsing of German Private Law Decisions, 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:

We present a work in progress report of our research on automatically analyzing German court decisions. For accessibility to information retrieval and text summarization processing, we show concepts of a parsing framework dealing with linguistic features of this genre. To cover these features, we first developed a description language inferred from content structure analysis presented before. The main aspect of this paper is the presentation of a graph-based parsing framework concept. The parser will be able to label the content structure of German court decisions.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the author.

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.

Boonchom & Soonthornphisaj on Legal Ontology Construction Using ATOB Algorithm

Vi-sit Boonchom and Nuanwan Soonthornphisaj presented a paper entitled Legal Ontology Construction Using ATOB Algorithm, 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:

Ontology is a knowledge representation technique that can be applied in many areas such as information retrieval. Ontology construction is a tedious job and time consuming task for law experts. This paper proposes a system framework called ATOB that can automatically generate a seed ontology and extend the ontology using ant colony algorithm. Two ontologies are created by ATOB system which are succession law ontology and family law ontology. We compare the performance of these ontologies with the ontologies manually created by law experts in our previous system (TLOE) and found that ATOB provides satisfactory result.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the authors.