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Papers Accepted to the JURIX 2011 Conference

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

My colleagues and I have had two papers (one long and one short) accepted for presentation at The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2011). The papers are available on the links.

On Rule Extraction from Regulations
Adam Wyner and Wim Peters

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.

Populating an Online Consultation Tool
Sarah Pulfrey-Taylor, Emily Henthorn, Katie Atkinson, Adam Wyner, and Trevor Bench-Capon

Abstract
The paper addresses the extraction, formalisation, and presentation of public policy arguments. Arguments are extracted from documents that comment on public policy proposals. Formalising the information from the arguments enables the construction of models and systematic analysis of the arguments. In addition, the arguments are represented in a form suitable for presentation in an online consultation tool. Thus, the forms in the consultation correlate with the formalisation and can be evaluated accordingly. The stages of the process are outlined with reference to a working example.

Shortlink to this page.

By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
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Posted in GATE, RDF/XML, e-Government, legal knowledge management, linguistics, text analytics, text mining | Comments Off

Workshop on Modelling Policy-making (MPM 2011)

Sunday, September 18th, 2011

In conjunction with

The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2011)

Wednesday December 14, 2011
University of Vienna
Vienna, Austria

Context:

As the European Union develops, issues about governance, legitimacy, and transparency become more pressing. National governments and the EU Commission realise the need to promote widespread, deliberative democracy in the policy-making cycle, which has several phases: 1) agenda setting, 2) policy analysis, 3) lawmaking, 4) administration and implementation, and 5) monitoring. As governments must become more efficient and effective with the resources available, modern information and communications technology (ICT) are being drawn on to address problems of information processing in the phases. One of the key problems is policy content analysis and modelling, particularly the gap between on the one hand policy proposals and formulations that are expressed in quantitative and narrative forms and on the other hand formal models that can be used to systematically represent and reason with the information contained in the proposals and formulations.

Submission Focus:

The workshop invites submissions of original research about the application of ICT to the early phases of the policy cycle, namely those before the legislators fix the legislation: agenda setting, policy analysis, and lawmaking. The research should seek to address the gap noted above. The workshop focuses particularly on using and integrating a range of subcomponents – information extraction, text processing, representation, modelling, simulation, reasoning, and argument – to provide policy making tools to the public and public administrators.

Intended Audience:

Legal professionals, government administrators, political scientists, and computer scientists.

Areas of Interest:

  • information extraction from natural language text
  • policy ontologies
  • formal logical representations of policies
  • transformations from policy language to executable policy rules
  • argumentation about policy proposals
  • web-based tools that support participatory policy-making
  • tools for increasing public understanding of arguments behind policy decisions
  • visualising policies and arguments about policies
  • computational models of policies and arguments about policies
  • integration tools
  • multi-agent policy simulations

Preliminary Workshop Schedule:

09:45-10:00 Workshop Opening comments

10:00-11:00 Paper Session 1

  • Using PolicyCommons to support the policy-consultation process: investigating a new workflow and policy-deliberation data model
    Neil Benn and Ann Macintosh
  • A Problem Solving Model for Regulatory Policy Making
    Alexander Boer, Tom Van Engers and Giovanni Sileno

11:00-11:15 Break (coffee, tea, air etc.)

11:15-12:15 Paper Session 2

  • Linking Semantic Enrichment to Legal Documents
    Akos Szoke, Andras Forhecz, Krisztian Macsar and Gyorgy Strausz
  • Semantic Models and Ontologies in Modelling Policy-making
    Adam Wyner, Katie Atkinson and Trevor Bench-Capon

12:15-13:15 Lunch break

13:15-14:45 Paper Session 3

  • Consistent Conceptual Descriptions to Support Formal Policy Model Development: Metamodel and Approach
    Sabrina Scherer and Maria Wimmer
  • The Policy Modeling Tool of the IMPACT Argumentation Toolbox
    Thomas Gordon
  • Ontologies for Governance, Risk Management and Policy Compliance
    Jorge Gonzalez-Conejero, Albert Merono-Penuela and David Fernandez Gamez

14:45-15:00 Break (coffee, tea, air etc.)

15:00-16:00 Paper Session 4 and Closing discussion

  • Policy making: How rational is it?
    Tom Van Engers, Ignace Snellen and Wouter Van Haaften
  • Closing discussion

Workshop Registration and Location:

Please see the JURIX 2011 website for all information about registration and location.

Webpage URL:

http://wyner.info/LanguageLogicLawSoftware/?p=1157

Important Dates:

  • Submission: Monday, October 24
  • Review Notification: Monday, November 7
  • Final Version: Thursday, December 1
  • Workshop date: Wednesday, December 14

Author Guidelines:

Submit position papers of between 2-5 pages in length in PDF format and using the IOS Press style files and authors’ guidelines at:
IOS Press Author Instructions

Submit papers to:

MPM 2011 on EasyChair

Publication:

The position papers are available only in an electronic version from the following link:

Proceedings of the Workshop on Modelling Policy-making

A call for selected extended versions of the papers will be issued for a special issue of AI and Law on Modelling Policy-making.

Contact Information:

Adam Wyner, adam@wyner.info
Neil Benn, n.j.l.benn@leeds.ac.uk

Program Committee Co-Chairs:

Adam Wyner (University of Liverpool, UK)
Neil Benn (University of Leeds, UK)

Program Committee (Preliminary):

Katie Atkinson
Trevor Bench-Capon
Bruce Edmonds
Tom van Engers
Euripidis Loukis
Tom Gordon
Ann Macintosh
Gunther Schefbeck
Maria Wimmer
Radboud Winkels

Posted in e-Government, law, legal knowledge engineering, legal knowledge management | Comments Off

Recent Papers

Saturday, May 14th, 2011

My colleagues and I have had the papers below accepted for upcoming conferences. The papers are all downloadable from the links provided.

Towards a Structured Online Consultation Tool
Adam Wyner, Katie Atkinson, and Trevor Bench-Capon
ePart August 2011, Deflt, The Netherlands

Abstract
The Structured Online Consultation tool (SCT) is a component tool in the IMPACT Project which is used to construct and present detailed surveys that solicit feedback from the public concerning issues in public policy. The tool is underwritten by a computational model of argumentation, incorporating fine-grained, interconnected argumentation schemes. While the public responds to easy to understand questions, the answers can be assimilated into a structured framework for analytic purposes, supporting automated reasoning about arguments and counter-arguments.

Multi-agent Based Classifi cation Using Argumentation From Experience
Maya Wardeh, Frans Coenen, Trevor Bench-Capon, and Adam Wyner
PAKDD May 2011, Shenzhen, China

Abstract
An approach to multi-agent classi fication, using an Argumentation from Experience paradigm is describe, whereby individual agents argue for a given example to be classifi ed with a particular label according to their local data. Arguments are expressed in the form of classi fication rules which are generated dynamically. The advocated argumentation process has been implemented in the PISA multi-agent framework, which is also described. Experiments indicate that the operation of PISA is comparable with other classi fication approaches and that it can be utilised for Ordinal Classifi cation and Imbalanced Class problems.

Note: I was added to this paper to present it at the conference. I’m familiar with the argumentation aspects, but the data-mining is new to me.

Semantic Models for Policy Deliberation
Katie M. Atkinson, Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, Dan Cartwright and Adam Z. Wyner
ICAIL June 2011, Pittsburgh, USA

Abstract
Semantic models have received little attention in recent years, much of their role having been taken over by developments in ontologies. Ontologies, however, are static, and so have only a limited role in reasoning about domains in which change matters. In this paper, we focus on the domain of policy deliberation, where policy decisions are designed to change things to realise particular social values. We explore how a particular kind of state transition system can be constructed to serve as a semantic model to support reasoning about alternative policy decisions. The policy making process includes stages that support the construction of a model, which can then be exploited in reasoning. The reasoning itself will be driven by a particular argumentation scheme for practical reasoning, and the ways in which arguments based on this scheme can be attacked and evaluated. The evaluation provides alternative policy positions. The semantics underpin a current web-based implementation, designed to solicit structured feedback on policy proposals.

Towards Formalising Argumentation about Legal Cases
Adam Z. Wyner, Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, Katie M. Atkinson
ICAIL June 2011, Pittsburgh, USA

Abstract
In this paper we offer an account of reasoning with legal cases in terms of argumentation schemes. These schemes, and undercutting attacks associated with them, are expressed as defeasible rules of inference that will lend themselves to formalisation within the ASPIC+ framework. We begin by modelling the style of reasoning with cases developed by Aleven and Ashley in the CATO project, which describes cases using factors, and then extend the account to accommodate the dimensions used in Rissland and Ashley’s earlier HYPO project. Some additional scope for argumentation is then identified and formalised.

By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

Posted in IMPACT Project, Papers, argumentation, case-based reasoning, e-Government | Comments Off

Presentation at tGov on the IMPACT Project

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

On March 18, 2011, I gave a presentation at tGov 2011 on the IMPACT Project.

The idea behind “transformational government” (or t-government) is that new technologies will change the way that the public interacts with the operation and delivery of public services, which are web-based, joined-up, citizen-centric than in the past. See, for example, Directgov, the website for the UK government. The IMPACT Project, which relates to how public policy is made, clearly addresses some of these issues.

Follow the links for the slides of the talk A Structured Online Consultation Tool and the paper Towards a Structured Online Consultation Tool.

Posted in IMPACT Project, argumentation, e-Government | Comments Off

Argumentation for Public-Policy Making – Presentation at the Central Office of Information, United Kingdom

Thursday, March 24th, 2011

In October, 2010, I made a presentation on the various elements of the IMPACT Project, which aims to apply computational models of argumentation to support public-policy making, at the Central Office of Information (COI) in London, United Kingdom. The COI is the UK government’s center for marketing and communications. It works with government departments (on a contract basis) to inform and engage citizens in issues that affect their lives. The COI is under the Minister for the Cabinet Office.

This was an interesting opportunity to learn more about how the UK government gathers and delivers information to the public.

For my part, on behalf of the IMPACT Project, I was outlining the several tools which could be used to support public-policy making. I outlined several of the current tools (some of which are used by the COI), their limitations, and some of the advantages that would be gained from the IMPACT tools. The slides are IMPACT Project Presentation at the Central Office of Information.

Since that meeting (the second), I’ve been in touch with Suzannah Kinsella, Head of Public Engagement at the COI. However, the UK government has been under some reorganisation and review (see links under Review into Government Communications). Work from the IMPACT Project may be a useful part of this. In early April I shall again meet with her and another colleague at the COI to see how we can specifically move ahead in collaborating with the COI on development of the tools.

Posted in argumentation, e-Government | Comments Off

Invited Speakers for JURIX 2010 in Liverpool Dec. 16-17

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

The invited speakers at JURIX 2010 in Liverpool Dec. 16-17 are:

  • John Sheridan, Head of e-Services in the Information Policy and Services Directorate of The National Archives. John is one of the main people behind data.gov.uk and legislation.gov.uk.
  • Wiebe van der Hoek, member of the Agent ART Group at the University of Liverpool. His research in agents concentrates on Logics for Agent Systems, Cooperation, Negotiation, Games and Agents, Data Mining and the Semantic Web.

I previously met John Sheridan August 2009 to discuss legislation and the semantic web; see my post. It will be very good to hear what has been going on since, particularly in the context of JURIX.

By Adam Wyner
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Posted in e-Government | Comments Off

ODET 2010: Online Deliberation Emerging Tools

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

The IMPACT Project that I am part of (at the University of Leeds) has some presentations coming up at the Online Deliberation Emerging Tools workshop (Leeds, 30 June) at the Conference on Online Deliberation (Leeds, 30 June–2 July). Interesting stuff (IMHO).

The program, including three members of the IMPACT Project — Ann Macintosh (who I work with at Leeds), Tom Gordon, and Sanjay Modgil.

9.30 Welcome: Simon Buckingham Shum (Open U. UK)
9.40 Tim van Gelder (Austhink Consulting, AUS — bCisive Online & MS Word Argumentation)
10.05 Paul Culmsee (Seven Sigma Business Solutions, AUS — Compendium case study)
10.30 Nikos Karacapilidis (U. Patras, GR — CoPe_it!)
10.55 Anna De Liddo & Simon Buckingham Shum (Open U., UK — Compendium/Cohere)
11.20 Refreshments
11.45 Mark Snaith (U. Dundee, UK — OVAview)
12.10 David Price (Debategraph, UK — Debategraph)
12.35 Sanjay Modgil (U. Liverpool, UK — Parmenides)
12.55 Any brief comments on the morning, continuing into lunch chats…
1.00 Lunch
2.15 Ann Macintosh (U. Leeds, UK) and Tom Gordon (Fraunhofer FOKUS, DE — Impact Project)
2.35 Mark Klein (MIT, USA — Deliberatorium)
3.00 Rob Ennals (Intel Labs, USA — DisputeFinder)
3.25 Refreshments
4.00 Closing discussion: did we go forwards?…
4.45 End

Posted in e-Government | 1 Comment »

Research Fellow at University of Leeds

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

On May 4, I’m taking up a research fellow position. I’ll continue to work on the IMPACT Project:

IMPACT will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level.

I’ll be based at the University of Leeds, Institute of Communication Studies, in the Centre for Digital Citizenship:

The CdC’s mission is to promote outstanding research on the changing nature of citizenship in a digitally networked society and to contribute to the analysis and development of policy in this area.

I’ll be working with Ann Macintosh:

My research agenda falls within two main socio-technical areas of interest. The first concerns the societal effect of technology on governance processes and the development of an evaluation framework for eParticipation. This area of my research is providing high-level insights into the mechanisms that need to be built into future online participation systems to appreciate how, where and why people use them. My second research area is the support for citizen engagement in policy making and the provision of public agency information and knowledge. Here the focus is on the use of Web 2.0 and computer supported argumentation systems to support deliberation and knowledge sharing.

Looking forward to working on these topics!

By Adam Wyner
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Posted in argumentation, e-Government, news | 2 Comments »

Recent Paper Submissions

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

During my time at the Leibniz Center for Law working on the IMPACT, I and my colleagues Tom van Engers and Kiavash Bahreini prepared and submitted three papers to conferences and workshops. The drafts of the papers are linked below along with the abstracts. Comments welcome.

A Framework for Enriched, Controlled On-line Discussion Forums for e-Government Policy-making
Adam Wyner and Tom van Engers
Submitted to eGOV 2010

Abstract
The paper motivates and proposes a framework for enriched on-line discussion forums for e-government policy-making, where pro and con statements for positions are structured, recorded, represented, and evaluated. The framework builds on current technologies for multi-threaded discussion lists by integrating modes, natural language processing, ontologies, and formal argumentation frameworks. With modes other than the standard reply “comment”, users specify the semantic relationship between a new statement and the previous statement; the result is an argument graph. Natural language processing with a controlled language constrains the domain of discourse, eliminates ambiguity and unclarity, allows a logical representation of statements, and facilitates information extraction. However, the controlled language is highly expressive and natural . Ontologies represent the knowledge of the domain. Argumentation frameworks evaluate the argument graph and generate sets of consistent statements. The output of the system is a rich and articulated representation of a set of policy statements which supports queries, information extraction, and inference

From Policy-making Statements to First-order Logic
Adam Wyner, Tom van Engers, and Kiavash Bahreini
Submitted to eGOVIS 2010

Abstract
Within a framework for enriched on-line discussion forums for e-government policy-making, pro and con statements for positions are input, structurally related, then logically represented and evaluated. The framework builds on current technologies for multi-threaded discussion, natural language processing, ontologies, and formal argumentation frameworks. This paper focuses on the natural language processing of statements in the framework. A small sample policy discussion is presented. We adopt and apply a controlled natural language (Attempto Controlled English) to constrain the domain of discourse, eliminate ambiguity and unclarity, allow a logical representation of statements which supports inference and consistency checking, and facilitate information extraction. Each of the polity statements is automatically translated into rst-order logic. The result is logical representation of the policy discussion which we can query, draw inferences (given ground statements), test for consistency, and extract detailed information.

Towards Web-base Mass Argumentation in Natural Language
Adam Wyner and Tom van Engers
Submitted to EKAW 2010

Abstract
Within the artificial intelligence community, argumentation has been studied for quite some years now. Despite progress, the field has not yet succeeded in creating support tools that members of the public could use to contribute their views to discussions of public policy. One important reason for that is that the input statements of participants in policy-making discussions are put forward in natural language, while translating the statements into the formal models used by argumentation scientists is cumbersome. These formal models can be used to automatically reason with, query, or transmit domain knowledge using web-based technologies. Making this knowledge explicit, formal, and expressed in a language which a machine can process is a labour, time, and knowledge intensive task. To make such translation and it requires expertise that most participants in policy-making debates do not have. In this paper we describe an approach with which we aim at contributing to a solution of this knowledge acquisition bottle-neck. We propose a novel, integrated methodology and framework which adopts and adapts existing technologies. We use semantic wikis which support mass, collaborative, distributive, dynamic knowledge acquisition. In particular, ACEWiki incorporates NLP tools, enabling linguistically competent users to enter their knowledge in natural language, while yielding a logical form that is suitable for automated processing. In the paper we will explain how we can extend the ACEWiki and augment it with argumentation tools which elicit knowledge from users, making implicit information explicit, and generate subsets of consistent knowledge bases from inconsistent knowledge bases. To a set of consistent propositions, we can apply automated reasoners, allowing users to draw inferences and make queries. The methodology and framework take a fragmentary, incremental development approach to knowledge acquisition in complex domains.

By Adam Wyner
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Posted in argumentation, controlled natural language, e-Government, legal knowledge engineering | 2 Comments »

The IMPACT Project — first two days

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am working in Amsterdam for the next three months on setting up a research project at the Leibniz Center for Law. The focus here is to develop information extract of textual debates (using GATE) and a tool for inputting debates in a structured manner that can be further processed for reasoning.

The official IMPACT Project information on CORDIS.

As part of my contribution, I have two draft papers, written in the spring and summer of 2009, which will be further developed at Leibniz: From Arguments in Natural Language to Argumentation Frameworks and Multi-modal Multi-threaded Online Forums. While these are early drafts of papers and not for wider circulation, they give a good indication of the line of thinking and of some of the key ideas we will be pursuing. Comments about these works are very welcome.

By Adam Wyner
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Posted in argumentation, controlled natural language, e-Government | Comments Off

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