Legal resources such as legislation, public notices, case law, and other legally relevant documents are increasingly freely available on the internet. They are almost entirely presented in natural language and in text. Legal professionals, researchers, and students need to extract and represent information from such resources to support compliance monitoring, analyse cases for case based reasoning, and extract information in the discovery phase of a trial (e-discovery), amongst a range of possible uses. To support such tasks, powerful text analytic tools are available. The tutorial presents an in depth demonstration of one toolkit the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) with examples and several briefer demonstrations of other tools.
Goals
Participants in the tutorial should come away with some theoretical sense of what textual information extraction is about. They will also see some practical examples of how to work with a corpus of materials, develop an information extraction system using GATE and the other tools, and share their results with the research community. Participants will be provided with information on where to find additional materials and learn more.
Intended Audience
The intended audience includes legal researchers, legal professionals, law school students, and political scientists who are new to text processing as well as experienced AI and Law researchers who have used NLP, but wish to get a quick overview of using GATE.
Covered Topics
Motivations to annotate, extract, and represent legal textual information.
Uses and domains of textual information extraction. Sample materials from legislation, case decisions, gazettes, e-discovery sources, among others.
Motivations to use an open source tool for open source development of textual information extraction tools and materials.
The relationship to the semantic web, linked documents, and data visualisation.
Linguistic/textual problems that must be addressed.
Alternative approaches (statistical, knowledge-light, machine learning) and a rationale for a particular bottom-up, knowledge-heavy approach in GATE.
Outline of natural language processing modules and tasks.
Introduction to GATE – loading and running simple applications, inspecting the results, refining the search results.
Development of fragments of a GATE system – lists, rules, and examination of results.
Discussion of more complex constructions and issues such as fact pattern identification, which is essential for case-based reasoning, named entity recognition, and structures of documents.
Introduction to ontologies.
Link textual information extraction to ontologies.
Introduction to related tools and approaches: C&C/Boxer (parser and semantic interpreter), Attempto Controlled English, scraperwiki, among others.
Date, Time, Location, and Logistics
Monday, June 10, afternoon session. Exact time will be announced as the conference program becomes available.
The tutorial will be held at the Casa dell’Aviatore, viale dell’Università 20 in Rome, Italy.
Dr. Adam Wyner
Lecturer, Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, Scotland
azwyner at abdn dot ac dot uk Website
The lecturer has a PhD in Linguistics, a PhD in Computer Science, and research background in computational linguistics. The lecturer has previously given a tutorial on this topic at JURIX 2009 and ICAIL 2011 along with an invited talk at RuleML 2012, has published several conference papers on text analytics of legal resources using GATE and C&C/Boxer, and continues to work on text analysis of legal resources.
I will be participating as a teaching assistant in the Summer School on Law and Logic in Florence, Italy, July 16-20, 2012. The school is jointly hosted by the European University Institute and the Harvard Law School.
From the description:
The Summer School on Law and Logic is the first course ever to provide a comprehensive introduction to the wide variety of uses of logic in the law. Our aim at this Summer School is to provide law students, graduate law students, and legal professionals with a knowledge of the methods of formal logic and the ability to apply those methods to the analysis and critical evaluation of legal arguments and sources of law (including statutes, cases, regulations, constitutional provisions).
The Summer School includes the basics of propositional and predicate deductive logic, as well as the use of logic for capturing representing deontic and Hohfeldian modalities, analogical reasoning and inference to the best explanation. It also addresses presents some aspects of non-deductive reasoning in law, such as defeasible reasoning, including argumentation schemes and inductive reasoning.
We believe that the kind of background in formal logic we offer in this course can be a very powerful tool for use in legal theory, for developing doctrinal legal research, for working in legal informatics (the application of computer programs to the analysis of law), and, more generally, for the practice of law.
This is an innovative school about core issues and approaches in Artificial Intelligence and Law. For me, it will be an opportunity to connect with familiar colleagues, work with new ones, and find out what lawyers think about formal logic. In addition, some of the legal materials that we will be analysing will be new to me, so that will be instructive.
I hope that this school is the beginning of an integration of AI into law school education.
Abstract
Legislation and regulations are expressed in natural language. Machine-readable forms of the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translation to a logic. The paper considers the latter form, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a machine-readable logic, sentences must be parsed and semantically translated. Manual translation is time and labour intensive, usually involving narrowly scoping the rules. While automated translation systems have made significant progress, problems remain. The paper outlines systems to automatically translate legislative clauses to a semantic representation, highlighting key problems and proposing some tasks to address them.
Abstract
Large corpora of legal texts are increasing available in the public domain. To make them amenable for automated text processing, various sorts of annotations must be added. We consider semantic annotations bearing on the content of the texts – legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. Adding annotations and developing gold standard corpora (to verify rule-based or machine learning algorithms) is costly in terms of time, expertise, and cost. To make the processes efficient, we propose several instances of GATE’s Teamware to support annotation tasks for legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. We engage annotation volunteers (law school students and legal professionals). The reports on the tasks are to be presented at the workshop.
A study in online, collaborative legal informatics
Adam Wyner, University of Liverpool Wim Peters, University of Sheffield
– Introduction –
This is an academic research study on legal informatics (information processing of the law). The study uses an online, collaborative tool to crowdsource the annotation of legal cases. The task is similar to legal professionals’ annotation of cases. The result will be a public corpus of searchable, richly annotated legal cases that can be further processed, analysed, or queried for conceptual annotations.
Adam and Wim are computer scientists who are interested in language, law, and the Internet.
We are inviting people to participate in this collaborative task. This is a beta version of the exercise, and we welcome comments on how to improve it. Please read through this blog post, look at the video, and get in contact.
– Highlighting, Annotations, and Legal Case Briefs –
In reading, analysing, and preparing a summary of a legal case, law students and legal professionals annotate cases by highlighting and colour coding elements of the case to make for easy identification. Different elements are annotated: the holding, the parties, the facts, and so on. A sample image of annotations is:
Annotations for Case Citations, Legal Roles, Jurisdiction, Hearing Date
– Problem –
To analyse a legal case, legal professionals annotate the case into its constituent parts. The analysis is summarised in a case brief. However, the current approach is very limited:
Analysis is time-consuming and knowledge-intensive.
Case briefs may miss relevant information.
Case analyses and briefs are privately held.
Case analyses are in paper form, so not searchable over the Internet.
Current search tools are for text strings, not conceptual information. We want to search for concepts such as for the holdings by a particular judge and with respect to causes of action against a particular defendant.
With annotated legal cases, we can enable conceptual search.
– Solution: Crowdsource Annotation –
We use an online legal case annotation tool and share the results to support:
Online search in legal cases for case details and concepts.
Semantic web applications and information extraction.
Crowd-source a legal case corpus.
The results of the study would be useful to:
Law school students learning case analysis.
Legal professionals in identifying relevant cases.
Researchers of legal informatics.
Broadly speaking, a corpus of analysed cases makes case law a public resource.
– Annotations: types and features –
To crowdsource conceptual annotations of legal cases, we use the General Architecture of Text Engineering (GATE) Teamware tool. Teamware is a web-based application that provides an annotator with a text to annotate and a list of annotations to use. The task is a web-based version of what legal analysts of cases already do.
We use familiar annotations for legal cases, divided (for ease of reference) into types and features. For example, we have a type Legal Roles and various features to select among, e.g. defendant. We are counting on you to have learned and used these annotations in the course of your legal study and practice.
You do not need to memorise the types and features as they will appear in the GATE Teamware tool. It may be handy to keep this webpage open so you can consult it or you could also print out the page.
The annotations we use are:
Argument For Party – arguments for a particular party, using the most general notion:
for Appellee, for Appellant, for Defendant, for Plaintiff.
Facts – legal and procedural facts:
Cause of Action – the specific legal theory upon which the plaintiff brings the suit.
Defenses raised by Defendant – the defendant defenses against the cause of action.
Legal Facts – the legally relevant facts of the case that are used in arguing the issues.
Remedy requested by Plaintiff – what the plaintiff asks the court to grant.
Indexes – various indicative information:
Case Citation – the citation of the particular case being annotated.
Court Address – the address of the court.
Hearing Date – the date of the hearing.
Judge Name – the names of the judge, annotated one at a time.
Jurisdiction – the legal jurisdiction of the case.
Issues – the issues before the court:
Procedural Issue – what the appellee claims that the lower court did wrong.
Substantive Issue – the point of law that is in dispute (legal facts have their own annotation).
Legal Roles – the role of the parties in the case:
General – buyer/seller, employer/employee, landlord/tenant, etc.
Other – relevant information not covered by the other annotations.
Procedural History – the disposition of the case with respect to the lower court(s):
Appeal Information – who appealed and why they appealed.
Damages – the damages awarded by the lower court.
Lower Court Decision – the lower court’s decision.
Reasoning Outcomes – various parts of the legal decision:
Concurring Opinion.
Dicta – commentary about the judgement and holding, but not part of the rationale.
Dissenting Opinion.
Holding – the rule of law or legal principle that was applied in making the judgement.
Judgement – the court’s final decision about the rights of the parties, the court’s response to a party’s request for relief, and bearing on prior decisions (e.g. affirmed, reversed, remanded, etc.).
Rationale – the court’s analysis of the issues and the reasons for the holding.
– Collaborate –
Take a look at the instructional video below. If you wish to collaborate on the task, send an email to Adam Wyner – adam@wyner.info
In the email, please include brief information for:
Your name
Your professional affiliation, e.g. institution, company, firm…
Your role where you work
Your background as a legal professional
This will help us know who we are collaborating with; from the pool of candidates, we will select participants for this early study.
You will be sent a user name and password so you can login to Teamware.
We respect your privacy. We are only interested in data in the aggregate and will not reveal any personal data to third parties.
– Next –
We have an instructional video that you can open in a new tab or window and that uses QuickTime. It lasts about 14 minutes. This will give you a good idea of what you will be doing. The presenter is Adam Wyner. You can see this here:
There are additional points about using the tool in section below on questions, problems, and observations.
After reading this blog, viewing the instructional video, and receiving your username and password, you can login to begin annotating at — GATE Teamware
– Survey –
When you are done with your task, please answer the questions on the survey to give us feedback on your experience using the annotation tool. The survey is available below. You can scroll down and answer the questions. Don’t forget to hit the “Done” button to submit your responses, which will be very useful in helping us understand your experience and thoughts about using the tool:
Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.
– What Then? –
We analyse the annotations from several annotators, comparing and contrasting them (interannotator agreement). This will show us similarities and differences in the understanding of the annotations and cases. As well, the results will help us develop a Gold Standard Corpus of legal cases, which are annotations of cases that annotators agree on. A Gold Standard is essential for information extraction and the development of advanced processing. We will publicly report the analysis of the exercise and make the annotated cases publicly available for re-use.
Once we have a better sense of how this study goes, we plan to roll out a larger version with more cases. And this is only the start….
– Questions, Problems, and Observations –
Thanks to participants for letting us know about their problems and sending their observations.
How easy is it to learn to use the tool? Take a look at the video to get a sense of this. With a little bit of practice, it is rather straightforward.
What if I don’t agree with some of your annotations or features? Write a comment or send us an email, and we will consider your comment. Try to be as clear and specific as you can. We are not lawyers, and we are dealing with a global community with local variation, so it is likely there will be some disagreement and variation.
Can I get the results of my annotations? Our approach is to make individual contributions to the whole. So, you will be able to access annotated cases after the exercise. There will be further information on how to work with the material.
How many cases must I do? You can do one or you can do as many as we have (not many in the beta project).
How much time will it take? About as long as it would take you to do a similar highlighting and annotation task with paper and markers.
What if I have a problem with using the tool or if the tool is buggy? Be patient and try to work with the tool. Sometimes things go wrong. Write a comment or send us an email, and we will try to advise. Note – we are only consumers of GATE Teamware, so are not responsible for the system.
How thoroughly should I annotate the cases? The more cases that are annotated fully and accurately, the better. Apply the same diligence as you would to thoroughly and carefully analyse cases with pen and paper. As you will be the beneficiary of the work of others, so too should you work to benefit them.
Do we track good annotators and bad annotators? We are interested in data in the aggregate, and are only interested in interannotator agreement and disagreement. This information will help us better understand differences in how the cases are understood and annotated. But, we can see how much time each person takes with each annotation task and measure how they perform against other annotators or a gold standard. If we have bad annotators, we will see this in the results; we would contact the annotator and see how best to improve the situation. As we noted above, we are not sharing information with third parties.
I cannot login with the username and password. Please let me know if you have this problem, and I will look into it.
I can login, but I cannot get the java webstart file to start. This is a tough problem to address over the internet. Some people have no problem, but some people are. Please let me know if you have this problem. Do check that you have followed the instructions (on blog and in movie).
I can login and start the annotation tool, but I cannot get the task. Please let me know, and I will look into it.
The text is too small and single spaced. At the moment, there is nothing we can do about this. We’ll try to keep this in mind for the future.
The highlighting tool is not easy to use. When I want to move from one annotated text to some new text, the tool doesn’t move to the new text. This is bit of a problem with the tool, which is not entirely reliable in the functionality. Try to play around with this to see what works for you. One strategy that I have found that improves performance is to annotate something. Then the annotation types appears in the upper right hand corner window among the list of annotations. Sometimes it is a good idea, when the problem occurs, is to click the annotations in that upper right hand corner window off and on (toggle them on and off). This seems to clear the system a bit so that one can go on to the next annotation. Give this a try. If you have problems, please let me know.
I found it very challenging. It is important to us to know this information to gauge how much text and the variety of annotations. We might reduce the number of annotations, breaking up the whole set into parts of the overall task.
Decision date is more important than hearing date, or at least should be provided in addition to hearing date. Probably this will be added to future iterations.
A participant, e.g. “Cone”, was originally a defendant, but was dismissed out before this appeal. I wonder if he should still be coded as “Defendant” or if he should be coded as an other role-holder. Good observation. I’ll have to consult with some lawyers further about this point.
There are sentences where the court introduced a fact and also appeared to reason using it. Is it right to code the whole sentence both as a legal fact and as a rationale. Yes, this is the way to handle this. Double annotations are always possible.
A similar problem occurred where the court offered a fact but also put a gloss on it as to its legal significance. Double annotations are always possible.
Some of the names of the categories were confusing or unclear. For example, using “Holding” for the name of the legal rule or principle was confusing (“Legal Rule” might be more intuitive). This is another point that we will need to consult further with other lawyers. There may also be some variation in terminology.
There is sometimes unclarity about role-players. A case involved a plaintiff, who was an appellee but also a cross-appellant, and a defendant who was thus an appellant and cross-appellee. These can be coded where on is plaintiff and appellee and the other defendant and appellant. But, they could have both been coded as appellee and appellant, given the existence of the cross appeal. Double (or more) annotating is fine.
Procedural History/Damages might be better framed as Procedural History/Remedies, as courts often provide injunctive relief or, as in this case, an accounting, as a remedy. This is another point that we will need to consult further with lawyers about terminology.
What if a case does not state any legal rules? Can implicit legal rules be annotated. For example, where novelty and non-obviousness are a sine qua non of a valid patent, one would not have known to mark some of the sentences as rationales. This isn’t a problem. If something is not in the case, then it is not annotated. We are not (yet) concerned with implicit information. But, if you know the implicit information, then annotate it.
How can I automatically search for and annotate the same string with the same annotation? In the instructional video, we wanted to keep the material short and to the point, so there are aspects of the annotation tool we did not cover. However, it is tedious to manually search for the same string and annotate it with the same annotation. Teamware’s Annotation Editor has a tool to support automatic search and annotation. To see how to do this, we have the video here:
How should I annotate holdings which may appear as holdings in cited cases and as part of the procedural history, as holdings in the current case, or as part of the rationale in the current case? This is an interesting and subtle point for us, and we will have to have a full consultation with lawyers to decide. But, for the time being, there can be no harm in multiple annotations, which we can then look at and work with later.
– Paper –
If you are interested in some of the ideas behind this project, please see our paper:
The paper will appear in May 2012 in the Proceedings of the LREC Conference Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, Istanbul, Turkey. The exercise here is a version of the exercise proposed in the paper.
REVISED SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR WORKSHOP: 19 February 2012
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
LREC Conference Information (Accommodation, Travel, Registration)
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. See the style guidelines and files on the LREC site:
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:
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)
Martyn Lloyd-Kelly and I have a forthcoming paper on arguing about emotions in legal cases where the ‘heat of passion’ plays a role. It appears in the proceedings of the Workshop on User Models for Motivational Systems the affective and the rational routes to persuasion.
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.
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.
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
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
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 remarks9:15 Jack Conrad (invited speaker). The Role of HLT in High-end Search and the Persistent Need for Advanced HLT Technologies10:00 Tommaso Fornaciari and Massimo Poesio. Lexical vs. Surface Features in Deceptive Language Analysis10:30 Nuria Casellas, Joan-Josep Vallbé and Thomas Bruce. Legal Thesauri Reuse. An Experiment with the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations11:00 Break11:15 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 mediation11:45 Emile De Maat and Radboud Winkels. Formal Models of Sentences in Dutch Law12:15 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 Law13:15 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 CFPSubmissions 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.
Paper submission deadline: DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS EXTENDED TO APRIL 10 by 00:00 ESTAcceptance notification sent: 15 April 2011Final version deadline: 23 May 2011Workshop date: 10 June 2011
Contact Information:
Primary contact: Adam Wyner, adam@wyner.infoSecondary 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 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:
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.
