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CFP – Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT 2012)

Monday, December 19th, 2011

In conjunction with

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)

Posted in GATE, controlled natural language, law, legal knowledge engineering, linguistics, text analytics, text mining | Comments Off

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
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

Posted in GATE, RDF/XML, e-Government, legal knowledge management, linguistics, text analytics, text mining | Comments Off

Draft — Materials for LEX 2011

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

Draft post

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

Posted in GATE, RDF/XML, legal knowledge engineering, legal knowledge management, linguistics, text analytics, text mining | Comments Off

General Architecture for Text Engineering Summer School 2011

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

I had the opportunity (thanks Katie Atkinson!) to attend the General Architecture for Text Engineering Summer School 2011. The GATE people have really developed this summer school very well. It was well attended (70 participants?) and well structured (three sections and various talks). GATE attacts a good, outgoing, helpful, and diverse group of people. A whole week of GATE and never a dull moment. Geeky, but true. And text analytics seems to be a growing area (at least according to the May 2011 issue of New Scientist, which lists it as one of seven “disruptive” technologies; I’ve always wanted to be bad).

As this was my second time at the GATE summer school, I sat in on the Advanced GATE session. All the slides and all the materials for hands on exercises are available on the GATE Summer School Wiki. In my week, we covered the following:

  • Module 9: Ontologies and Semantic Annotation
    • Introduction to Ontologies
    • GATE Ontology Editor
    • GATE Ontology Annotation Tools for Entities and Relations
    • Automatic Semantic Annotation in GATE
    • Measuring Performance
    • Using the Large Knowledge Base gazetteer (LKB)
  • Module 10: Advanced GATE Applications
    • Customising ANNIE
    • Working with different languages
    • Complex applications
    • Conditional Processing
    • Section-by-section processing
  • Module 11: Machine Learning
    • Machine learning and evaluation concepts
    • Using ML in GATE
    • Engines and algorithms)
    • Entity learning hands-onl session
    • Relation extraction hands-on session
  • Module 12: Opinion Mining
    • Introduction to opinion mining and sentiment analysis
    • Using GATE tools to perform sentiment analysis
    • Machine learning for sentiment analysis hands-on session
    • Future directions for opinion mining
  • Module 13: Semantic Technology and Linked Open Data: Basics, Tools, and Applications
    • Linked Open Data: Introduction of key principles and some key tools (FactForge, LinkedLifeData)
    • Semantic Annotation with Linked Data
    • Semantic Search

Posted in GATE, ontology, text analytics, text mining | Comments Off

ICAIL 2011 Tutorial: Textual Information Extraction from Legal Resources Using GATE

Saturday, February 19th, 2011

Slides for ICAIL tutorial, Monday, June 6, 2011, University of Pittsburgh.

Textual Information Extraction from Legal Resources using GATE

Posted in GATE, text mining | 1 Comment »

Workshop Applying Human Language Technology to the Law

Saturday, January 29th, 2011

A workshop at
ICAIL 2011: The Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law

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)

Posted in controlled natural language, law, legal knowledge engineering, linguistics, text mining | 4 Comments »

Proceedings and Program for Workshop on Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

in conjunction with JURIX 2010

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

Posted in legal knowledge engineering, legal knowledge management, text mining | 1 Comment »

Legal Know-How Workshop Presentations

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

December 10, 2010, I gave a presentation at the International Society for Knowledge Organisation’s meeting on Legal Know-How. It was an interesting meeting, where I got the opportunity to present my work to members of the legal profession, hear what law firms are doing about knowledge management, and make some good new contacts.

The slides of all the talks, including mine, are available:

ISKO-UK Legal Know-How meeting

In a couple of weeks, ISKO will also add mp3s of the talks, so one can see the slides and hear the talks. Nice way to do things, as remarks and narration are almost more crucial than the slides themselves.

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

Posted in GATE, law, legal knowledge management, text mining | 1 Comment »

Call for Papers: JURIX 2010 Workshop on Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules

Friday, October 8th, 2010

I am organising a workshop at JURIX 2010

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

Posted in law, legal knowledge engineering, legal knowledge management, text mining | 1 Comment »

Presentation at Legal Know-how Workshop, Nov. 10, 2010

Friday, October 8th, 2010

I have been invited to make a presentation on Textual information extraction and ontologies for legal case-based reasoning at a Legal Know-how Workshop, which is an industry oriented event organised by the International Society for Knowledge Management UK.

Date: 10 November 2010
Time: 13:30-19:00
Venue: University College London
Medical Sciences Building
A. V. Hill Lecture Theatre
Gower Street
London, WC1E 6BT

See the workshop website for registration fee (either free or under £25) and booking.

This will be a very interesting opportunity to hear from and talk with industry consultants and experts about the latest developments in legal knowledge management. My thanks to Stella Dextre Clarke of ISKO-UK for organising the event and inviting me to take part.

Programme

13:30 Registration
14:00 Welcome from ISKO-UK by Stella Dextre Clarke
14:05 Legal knowledge – the practitioner’s viewpoint
Melanie Farquharson, 3Kites Consulting

This session will focus on the practical situations in which lawyers look for knowledge in order to deliver legal services to their clients. It will identify some typical ‘use cases’ and consider ways in which knowledge can be delivered to the practitioner – even without them having to look for it.

14:35 Why lawyers need taxonomies – adventures in organising legal knowledge
Kathy Jacob & Lynley Barker, Pinsent Masons LLP;
Graham Barbour & Mark Fea, LexisNexis

This presentation will cover the practical issues encountered by a law firm in its quest to improve findability of one of its key resources – knowledge and information. We will discuss our approach to building taxonomies, the tools and processes deployed and how we anticipate our taxonomy will be applied and consumed by lawyers and publishers.
The LexisNexis part of the presentation will focus on the challenges of building and applying legal taxonomies to suit the breadth and depth of content they provide online. It will also examine ways in which taxonomies can be surfaced in the user interface and help to drive compelling functionality that improves the user’s search experience.

15:20 Taxonomy management at Clifford Chance

Mats Bergman, Clifford Chance

This talk will describe how taxonomy management works in practice at Clifford Chance. As an increasing number of core knowledge resources are making use of the same set of firm-wide taxonomies, the increased interdependencies necessitate the implementation of a controlled process for updating the taxonomies. A simple governance model will be presented. Some thoughts will follow on the evolution of taxonomy development within a larger organisation and the current challenge of using social tagging in conjunction with controlled vocabularies.
15:50 Refreshments (Lower Refectory)
16:20 Textual information extraction and ontologies for legal case-based reasoning
Adam Wyner, University of Liverpool

This talk gives a brief overview of current developments and prospects in two related areas of the legal semantic web for legal cases – textual information extraction and ontologies. Textual information extraction is a process of automatically annotating and extracting textual information from the legal case base (precedents), thereby identifying elements such as participants, the roles the participants play, the factors which were considered in arriving at a decision, and so on. The information is valuable not only for search (to find applicable precedents), but also to populate an ontology for legal case-based reasoning. An ontology is a formal representation of key aspects of the knowledge of legal professionals with which we can reason (e.g. given an assertion that something is a legal case, we can infer other properties) and with respect to which we can write rules (e.g. reasoning using case factors to arrive at a legal decision). Since it is expensive to manually populate an ontology (meaning to read cases and input the data into the ontology), we use textual information extraction to automatically populate the ontology. We conclude with an appeal for open source, collaborative development of legal knowledge systems among partners in academia, industry, and government.
17:00 Collaboration across boundaries
Gwenda Sippings & Gerard Bredenoord, Linklaters LLP

In this presentation, we will look at approaches to managing legal know-how in a major global law firm. We will describe several boundaries that we have to consider when organising our know-how, including boundaries between professionals, countries, internal and external resources and the well debated boundary between information and knowledge. We will also share some of the ways in which we are making our know-how available to the fee earners and other professionals in the firm, using social and technological solutions.

17:35 Reconciling the taxonomy needs of different users
Derek Sturdy, Tikit Knowledge Services

The last decade has seen the development of a substantial number of legal know-how and knowledge databases. It has also shown up a serious question on whether the metadata, and especially the taxonomies, that are applied to the various knowledge items, should be tailored to the particular needs of end-users, or whether, so to speak, "one size can fit all". In particular, this talk will discuss the overlapping, but discrete, needs of those using knowledge resources primarily for legal drafting and document production, and of those conducting legal research, and will address the relative value today, (as opposed to in 2000), of the effort put into internal metadata creation for those two sorts of end-users.

By Adam Wyner
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Posted in legal knowledge management, ontology, taxonomy, text mining | Comments Off

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