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.

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

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

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

Arguing with Emotion
Martyn Llloyd-Kelly and Adam Wyner
UMMS July 11, Girona, Spain

The paper at the link is a draft and will be somewhat revised for distribution at the workshop.

Abstract
Emotions are commonly thought to be beyond the pale of rational analysis, for they are subjective, may vary even with respect to the person experiencing the emotion, and may conflict with rational thought. In this paper, we develop the position that emotions can be the objects of argumentation, which we express by introducing emotion 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.

On the Linguistic Analysis of Argumentation Schemes
Adam Wyner
LAGB September 7-10, Manchester, United Kingdom

This is an accepted abstract of a paper which is as yet to be written.

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