Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 2012 (LREC 2012)

27 May, 2012
Istanbul, Turkey

Context:

The legal domain represents a primary candidate for web-based information distribution, exchange and management, as testified by the numerous e-government, e-justice and e-democracy initiatives worldwide. The last few years have seen a growing body of research and practice in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Law which addresses a range of topics: automated legal reasoning and argumentation, semantic and cross-language legal information retrieval, document classification, legal drafting, legal knowledge discovery and extraction, as well as the construction of legal ontologies and their application to the law domain. In this context, it is of paramount importance to use Natural Language Processing techniques and tools that automate and facilitate the process of knowledge extraction from legal texts.

Since 2008, the SPLeT workshops have been a venue where researchers from the Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence and Law communities meet, exchange information, compare perspectives, and share experiences and concerns on the topic of legal knowledge extraction and management, with particular emphasis on the semantic processing of legal texts. Within the Artificial Intelligence and Law community, there have also been a number of dedicated workshops and tutorials specifically focussing on different aspects of semantic processing of legal texts at conferences such as JURIX-2008, ICAIL-2009, ICAIL-2011, as well as in the International Summer School “Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web” (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011).

To continue this momentum and to advance research, a 4th Workshop on “Semantic Processing of Legal Texts” is being organized at the LREC-2012 conference to bring to the attention of the broader LR/HLT (Language Resources/Human Language Technology) community the specific technical challenges posed by the semantic processing of legal texts and also share with the community the motivations and objectives which make it of interest to researchers in legal informatics. The outcome of these interactions are expected to advance research and applications and foster interdisciplinary collaboration within the legal domain.

New to this edition of the workshop are two sub-events (described below) to provide common and consistent task definitions, datasets, and evaluation for legal-IE systems along with a forum for the presentation of varying but focused efforts on their development.

The main goals of the workshop and associated events are to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in legal knowledge extraction and management, to explore new research and development directions and emerging trends, and to exchange information regarding legal language resources and human language technologies and their applications.

Sub-events:

Dependency Parsing
The first sub-event will be a shared task specifically focusing on dependency parsing of legal texts: although this is not a domain-specific task, it is a task which creates the prerequisites for advanced IE applications operating on legal texts, which can benefit from reliable preprocessing tools. For this year our aim is to create the prerequisites for more advanced domain-specific tasks (e.g. event extraction) to be organized in future SPLeT editions. We strongly believe that this could be a way to attract the attention of the LR/HLT community to the specific challenges posed by the analysis of this type of texts and to have a clearer idea of the current state of the art. The languages dealt with will be Italian and English. A specific Call for Participation for the shared task is available in a dedicated page.

Semantic Annotation
The second sub-event will be an online, manual, collaborative, semantic annotation exercise, the results of which will be presented and discussed at the workshop. The goals of the exercise are: (1) to gain insight on and work towards the creation of a gold standard corpus of legal documents in a cohesive domain; and (2) to test the feasibility of the exercise and to get feedback on its annotation structure and workflow. The corpus to be annotated will be a selection of documents drawn from EU and US legislation, regulation, and case law in a particular domain (e.g. consumer or environmental protection). For this exercise, the language will be English. A specific Call for Participation for this annotation exercise is available in a dedicated page.

Areas of Interest:

The workshop will focus on the topics of the automatic extraction of information from legal texts and the structural organisation of the extracted knowledge. Particular emphasis will be given to the crucial role of language resources and human language technologies.

Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Construction, extension, merging, customization of legal language resources, e.g. terminologies, thesauri, ontologies, corpora
• Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts
• Semantic annotation of legal text
• Legal text processing
• 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 legal arguments into a logical formalism
• Dialogue protocols for legal information processing
• Controlled language systems for law

Workshop Schedule – TBA:

Workshop Registration and Location – TBA:

Webpage URL:

http://wyner.info/LanguageLogicLawSoftware/?p=1233

Important Dates:

• Submission: 10 February 2012
• Acceptance Notification: 5 March 2012
• Final Version: 23 March 2012
• Workshop date: 27 May 2012

Author Guidelines:

Submissions are solicited from researchers working on all aspects of semantic processing of legal texts. Authors are invited to submit papers describing original completed work, work in progress, interesting problems, case studies or research trends related to one or more of the topics of interest listed above. The final version of the accepted papers will be published in the Workshop Proceedings.

Short or full papers can be submitted. Short papers are expected to present new ideas or new visions that may influence the direction of future research, yet they may be less mature than full papers. While an exhaustive evaluation of the proposed ideas is not necessary, insight and in-depth understanding of the issues is expected. Full papers should be more well developed and evaluated. Short papers will be reviewed the same way as full papers by the Program Committee and will be published in the Workshop Proceedings.

Full paper submissions should not exceed 10 pages, short papers 6 pages; both should be typeset using a font size of 11 points. Style files will be made available by LREC for the camera-ready versions of accepted papers. Papers should be submitted electronically, no later than February 10, 2012. The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF.

Submit papers to:

Submission will be electronic using START paper submission software available at:

https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/SPLeT2012/

Note that when submitting a paper through the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. For further information on this new initiative, please refer to:

http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012

Publication:

After the workshop a number of selected, revised, peer-reviewed articles will be published in a Special Issue on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts of the AI and Law Journal (Springer).

Contact Information:

Address any queries regarding the workshop to:

lrec_legalWS@ilc.cnr.it

Program Committee Co-Chairs:

Enrico Francesconi (National Research Center, Italy)
Simonetta Montemagni (National Research Center, Italy)
Wim Peters (University of Sheffield, UK)
Adam Wyner (University of Liverpool, UK)

Program Committee (Preliminary):

Kevin Ashley (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Johan Bos (University of Rome, Italy)
Daniele Bourcier (Humboldt Universitat, Germany)
Pompeu Casanovas (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Jack Conrad (Thomson Reuters, USA)
Matthias Grabmair (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Antonio Lazari (Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Italy)
Leonardo Lesmo (Universita di Torino, Italy)
Marie-Francine Moens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
Thorne McCarty (Rutgers University, USA)
Raquel Mochales Palau (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de Evora, Portugal)
Tony Russell-Rose (UXLabs, UK)
Erich Schweighofer (Universitat Wien, Austria)
Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University, Australia)
Manfred Stede (University of Potsdam, Germany)
Daniela Tiscornia (National Research Council, Italy)
Tom van Engers (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Giulia Venturi (Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Italy)
Vern R. Walker (Hofstra University, USA)
Radboud Winkels (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Arguing about Emotions
Martyn Lloyd-Kelly and Adam Wyner

Abstract
Emotions are commonly thought to be beyond rational analysis. In this paper, we develop the position that emotions can be the objects of argumentation and used as terms in emotional argumentation schemes. Thus, we can argue about whether or not, according to normative standards and available evidence, it is plausible that an individual had a particular emotion. This is particularly salient in legal cases, where decisions can depend on explicit arguments about emotional states.

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

At the links below, you can find the slides and hands on materials on GATE for the LEX summer school on Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web.

GATE Legislative Rulebook

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

Annotating Legal Case Factors with GATE TeamWare

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

Towards Annotating and Extracting Textual Legal Case Elements
Adam Wyner

Abstract
The paper presents an outline of a method for semantic, conceptual search in legal case documents using the GATE tool.

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

Corpus Development

Unlike the situation from several years ago, we have accessible sources of large corpora of legal textual information. The World Legal Information Institutes provide free, independent and non-profit access to worldwide law. For example, one can go to the US site and download cases: United States v Grant [1961] USCA9 19; 286 F.2d 157 (19 January 1961); one can request zipped files or screen scrap cases. The LIIs have introduced standardised references and formats for cases. There are boolean and regex searches.

From the contacts that I have had (e.g. in the US and UK), the LIIs would be very happy to collaborate with academic researchers in the analysis of their data and in keeping with their primary mission. In particular, developing tools that can be integrated and deployed with their platforms might be a way to go, thereby addressing significant platform and dissemination issues.

Another source of corpora is public.resource.org, which distributes a range of corpora covering legislation, codes, and cases.

Analysis and Annotation

There are a range of issues about information retrieval and extraction. Others can speak about IR, statistical, machine learning approaches. What I know better is annotation, whether fully or semi automatic and manual. Here we have issues about what to annotate and how. Some low level information is unproblematic (e.g. entities of a range of sorts, sections, and sentiment); higher level information (e.g. factors) might be more complex. I have some suggestions for annotations for low level information; a good starting point for factors are the CATO factors, though there is a general issue about how to extend factor identification to other domains (CATO factors are specific for intellectual property).

One general problem with analysis is that different researchers might use different tools in their work and just report the results. This means results are not interchangeable, which is particularly problematic with annotation work. If a common ‘framework’ tool is used and some consensus is developed about (at least) low level annotation types, then work can proceed more collaboratively, transparently, and reproducibly. One can develop a more forceful argument for researchers (public service bodies and information providers) to promote such an open development methodology (among them are justification and traceability, see Wyner and Peters 2010 and David Lewis’s ICAIL 2011 keynote address on related points). General Architecture for Text Engineering is an open framework for text processing modules.

There are ‘open’ systems for text annotation — Open Calais and Open Up platform’s data enrichment service from The Stationery Office. However, there are intellectual property issues that need to be considered.

Another general issue is how to carry out manual annotation, for example to build gold standards, which are required for machine learning systems. There has been significant progress, for example, with TeamWare, which provides for curated, web-based annotation tools along with annotation analysis (e.g. inter-annotator agreement). For a short tutorial (for an experiment) on using TeamWare for annotation of some legal case factors, see Web-based Annotation Support for the Law. Wim Peters and I proposed to law school faculty to use this tool to support their student exercises for first and second year students since these exercises often require identifying and extracting information from cases. Wim and I think integrating annotation exercises into legal e-learning could both help to develop large annotated sets of data and to serve an important educational purpose. See our paper about some of these points and proposals.

Research Questions

Large corpora can be formed, tools can be applied to them, but for fund raising, the community needs to develop a range of motivating research questions and use cases. Asides from questions pursued in the AI and Law community, we might consult further with public bodies (National Center for State Courts and similar), legal information service providers (Lexis-Nexis, ThomsonReuters, Practical Law Company, law societies, political scientists, etc. The kinds of answers we look for partially guide how we structure not only the corpora, but moreso the annotations.

Funding Opportunities

Digging into Data and the Request for Proposals, but the due date is June 16 (I had been working on a proposal, but needed better research questions to hold local interest). Though the deadline is too soon to submit a proposal, it does demonstrate a widespread interest in funding bodies in the development and analysis of large corpora in the humanities and social sciences. The other obvious funding sources are national (US, UK, French, etc) and international (EU and Digging into Data).

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

Applying Human Language Technology to the Law (AHLTL 2011)

June 10, 2011
University of Pittsburgh School of Law

Overview:

Over the last decade there have been dramatic improvements in the effectiveness and accuracy of Human Language Technology (HLT), accompanied by a significant expansion of the HLT community itself. Over the same period, there have been widespread developments in web-based distribution and processing of legal textual information, e.g. cases, legislation, citizen information sources, etc. More recently, a growing body of research and practice has addressed a range of topics common to both the HLT and Artificial Intelligence and Law communities, including automated legal reasoning and argumentation, semantic information retrieval, cross and multi-lingual information retrieval, document classification, logical representations of legal language, dialogue systems, legal drafting, legal knowledge discovery and extraction, linguistically based legal ontologies, among others. Central to these shared topics is use of HLT techniques and tools for automating knowledge extraction from legal texts and for processing legal language.

The workshop has several objectives. The first objective is to broaden the research base by introducing HLT researchers to the materials and problems of processing legal language. The second objective is to introduce AI and Law researchers to up-to-date theories, techniques, and tools from HLT, which can be applied to legal language. And the third objective is to deepen the existing research streams. Altogether, the interactions among the researchers are expected to advance research and applications and foster interdisciplinary collaboration within the legal domain.

Context:

Over the last two years, there have been several workshops and tutorials on or relating to processing legal texts and legal language, demonstrating a significant surge of interest. There have been two workshops on Semantic processing of legal texts (SPLeT) held in conjunction with LREC (2008 in Marrakech, Morocco; and 2010 in Malta). At ICAIL 2009, there were two workshops, LOAIT ’09 – the 3rd Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques joint with the 2nd Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts and NALEA ’09 – Workshop on the Natural Language Engineering of Legal Argumentation: Language, Logic, and Computation. LOAIT ’09 focussed on Legal Knowledge Representation with particular emphasis on the issue of ontology acquisition from legal texts, while NALEA ’09 tackled issues related to legal argumentation. In 2009, the National Science Foundation sponsored a workshop Automated Content Analysis and the Law, which drew participants from computational linguistics and political science. Finally, at the Second Workshop on Controlled Natural Language (CNL 2010), there were several presentations related to legal language.

Intended Audience:

The intended audience would include both current members of the AI & law community who are interested in automated analysis of legal texts and corpora and, in addition, HLT researchers for whom analysis of legal texts would provide an opportunity for development and evaluation of HLT techniques. It is anticipated that participants would come from industry (e.g. The MITRE Corporation, Thomson/Reuters, Endeca, Lexis/Nexis, Oracle), the judiciary in the US and Europe, national organisations (e.g. the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, the US National Science Foundation, European Science Foundation, the UK Office of Public Sector Information), government security agencies, legal professionals, and academic HLT researchers.

Areas of Interest:

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.

Workshop Schedule

9:00 Opening remarks
9:15 Jack Conrad (invited speaker). The Role of HLT in High-end Search and the Persistent Need for Advanced HLT Technologies
10:00 Tommaso Fornaciari and Massimo Poesio. Lexical vs. Surface Features in Deceptive Language Analysis
10:30 Nuria Casellas, Joan-Josep Vallbé and Thomas Bruce. Legal Thesauri Reuse. An Experiment with the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations
11:00 Break
11:15 Meritxell Fernández-Barrera and Pompeu Casanovas. Towards the intelligent processing of non-expert generated content: mapping web 2.0 data with ontologies in the domain of consumer mediation
11:45 Emile De Maat and Radboud Winkels. Formal Models of Sentences in Dutch Law
12:15 Guido Boella, Llio Humphreys, Leon Van Der Torre and Piercarlo Rossi. Eunomos, a legal document management system based on legislative XML and ontologies (Position paper)
12:45 Anna Ronkainen. From Spelling Checkers to Robot Judges? Some Implications of Normativity in Language Technology and AI and Law
13:15 Lunch

Workshop Location

To be announced.

Author Guidelines:

The workshop solicits full papers and position papers. Authors are welcome to submit tentative, incremental, and exploratory studies which examine HLT issues distinctive to the law and legal applications. Papers not accepted as full papers may be accepted as short research abstracts. Submissions will be evaluated by the program committee. For information on submission details (length, format, notion of position paper, etc) see the ICAIL 2011 conference information:
ICAIL CFP

Submissions should be submitted electronically in PDF to the EasyChair site by the deadline (see important dates below):
AHLTL 2011, an EasyChair site

Publication:

Selected papers are to be invited to be revised and submitted to a special edition of the AI and Law journal, edited by Adam Wyner and Karl Branting.

The papers from the workshop are available from here.

Webpage:

Applying Human Language Technology to the Law

Important Dates:

Paper submission deadline: DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS EXTENDED TO APRIL 10 by 00:00 EST

Acceptance notification sent: 15 April 2011

Final version deadline: 23 May 2011

Workshop date: 10 June 2011

Contact Information:

Primary contact: Adam Wyner, adam@wyner.info

Secondary contact: Karl Branting, lbranting@mitre.org

Program Committee Co-Chairs:

Adam Wyner (University of Liverpool, UK)

Karl Branting (The MITRE Corporation, USA)

Program Committee:

Kevin Ashley (University of Pittsburgh, USA)

Johan Bos (University of Rome, Italy)

Sherri Condon (The MITRE Corporation, USA)

Jack Conrad (Thomson Reuters, USA)

Enrico Francesconi (ITTIG-CNR, Florence, Italy)

Ben Hachey (Macquarie University, Australia)

Alessandro Lenci (Università di Pisa, Italy)

Leonardo Lesmo (Università di Torino, Italy)

Emile de Maat (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Thorne McCarty (Rutgers University, USA)

Marie-Francine Moens (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)

Simonetta Montemagni (ILC-CNR, Italy)

Raquel Mochales Palau (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)

Craig Pfeifer (The MITRE Corporation, USA)

Wim Peters (University of Sheffield, United Kingdom)

Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de Évora, Portugal)

Mike Rosner (University of Malta, Malta)

Tony Russell-Rose (Endeca, United Kingdom)

Erich Schweighofer (Universität Wien, Austria)

Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University, Australia)

Manfred Stede (University of Potsdam, Germany)

Mihai Surdeanu (Stanford University, USA)

Daniela Tiscornia (ITTIG-CNR, Italy)

Radboud Winkels (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Jonathan Zeleznikow (Victoria University, Australia)

December 15, 2010
Department of Computer Science, Ashton Building, Room 310
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

Workshop Proceedings

Workshop Program

Session I

14:30-14:35
Welcome and Introductory remarks

14:35-15:00
Steven van Driel (Utrecht University) and Henry Prakken (Utrecht University and University of Groningen)
Visualising the argumentation structure of an expert witness report with Rationale (extended abstract)

15:00-15:25
Thomas F. Gordon (Fraunhofer FOKUS)
Analyzing open source license compatibility issues with Carneades

15:25-15:40
Martyn Lloyd-Kelly, Adam Wyner, and Katie Atkinson (University of Liverpool)
Emotional argumentation schemes in legal cases (short position paper)

15:40-16:00
Short informal remarks

16:00-16:30 Tea

Session II

16:30-16:55
Anna Ronkainen (University of Helsinki)
MOSONG, a fuzzy logic model of trade mark similarity

16:55-17:20
Adam Wyner and Trevor Bench-Capon (University of Liverpool)
Visualising legal case-based reasoning argumentation schemes

17:20-17:45
Burkhard Schafer (University of Edinburgh)
Say “cheese”: natural kinds, deontic logic and European Court of Justice decision C-210\/89

17:45-18:00
Short informal remarks

For general information, see JURIX 2010

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

Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules

As part of the Jurix 2010 conference in Liverpool UK, we will hold a Workshop on Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules. This workshop is a follow on from successful workshops at Jurix 2007 and ICAIL 2009.

Legal cases and legal rules in common law contexts have been modelled in a variety of ways over the course of research in AI and Law to support different styles of reasoning for a variety of problem-solving contexts, such as decision-making, information retrieval, teaching, etc. Particular legal topic areas and cases have received wide coverage in the AI and Law literature including wild animals (e.g. Pierson v. Post, Young v. Hitchens, and Keeble v. Hickeringill), intellectual property (e.g. Mason v. Jack Daniel Distillery), and evidence (e.g. the Rijkbloem case). As well, some legal rules have been widely discussed, such as legal argument schemes (e.g. Expert Testimony) or rules of evidence (see Walton 2002). However, other areas have been less well covered. For example, there appears to be less research on modelling legal cases in civil law contexts; investigation of taxonomies and ontologies of legal rules would support abstraction and formalisation (see Sherwin 2009); additional legal rules could be brought under the scope of investigation, such as those bearing on criminal assault or causes of action.

The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum in which researchers can present their research on modelling legal cases and legal rules.

Papers are solicited that model a particular legal case or a small set of legal rules. Authors are free to choose the case or set of legal rules and analyse them according to the authors’ preferred model of representation; any theoretical discussion should be grounded in or exemplified by the case or rules at hand. Papers should make clear what are the particular distinctive features of their approach and why these features are useful in modelling the chosen case or rules. The workshop is an opportunity for authors to demonstrate the benefits of their approach and for group discussions to identify useful overlapping features as well as aspects to be further explored and developed.

Format of papers and submission guidelines
Full papers should not be more than 10 pages long and should be submitted in PDF format. It is suggested that the conference style files are used for formatting (see IOS Press site). All papers should provide:

• A summary of the case or legal rules.
• An overview of the representation technique, or reference to a full description of it.
• The representation itself.
• Discussion of any significant features.

Short position papers are also welcome from those interested in the topic but who do not wish to present a fully represented case or elaborate discussion of a set of legal rules; the short position papers can outline ideas, sketch directions of research, summarise or reflect on previously published work that has addressed the topic. A short position paper should be not more than five pages, giving a clear impression of what would be presented.

All submissions should be emailed as a PDF attachment to the workshop organiser, Adam Wyner, at: adam@wyner.info.

Programme Committee (Preliminary)

• Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK
• Floris Bex, University of Dundee, UK
• Trevor Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, UK
• Tom Gordon, Fraunhofer, FOKUS, Germany
• Robert Richards, Seattle, Washington, USA
• Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Italy
• Burkhard Schafer, Edinburgh Law School, Scotland
• Douglas Walton, University of Windsor, Canada

Organisation
Organiser of this workshop is Adam Wyner, University of Liverpool, UK. You can contact the workshop organiser by sending an email to adam@wyner.info

Dates
Paper submission: Friday, November 5, 2010
Accepted Notification: Friday, November 12, 2010
Workshop Registration: Friday, November 19, 2010
December 15th, 2010 Jurix Workshops/Tutorials
December 16th-17th, 2010 Jurix 2010 Main Conference

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