There is a short paper (five pages) which outlines key ideas, but has little in the way of discussion or background discussion. There is a long paper (28 pages) which goes into the proposal in much more depth.

Comments and discussion on these documents are very welcome.

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

This collaborative report highlights the properties and prospects of Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs). The report poses a range of questions concerning the goals of the CNL, the design, the linguistic aspects, the relationships and evaluation of CNLs, and the application tools. In posing the questions, the report attempts to structure the field of CNLs and to encourage further systematic discussion by researchers and developers.

The reference and link to the article:

A. Wyner, K. Angelov, G. Barzdins, D. Damljanovic, N. Fuchs, S. Hoefler, K. Jones, K. Kaljurand, T. Kuhn, M. Luts, J. Pool, M. Rosner, R. Schwitter, and J. Sowa. On Controlled Natural Languages: Properties and Prospects, to appear in: N.E. Fuchs (ed.), Workshop on Controlled Natural Languages, CNL 2009, LNCS/LNAI 5972, Springer, 2010.

CALL FOR PAPERS

23 May 2010, Malta

Workshop description

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.

With the last two years, a number of dedicated workshops and tutorials specifically focussing on different aspects of semantic processing of legal texts has demonstrated the current interest in research on Artificial Intelligence and Law in combination with Language Resources (LR) and Human Langugage Technologies (HLT). The LREC 2008 Workshop on “Semantic processing of legal texts” was held in Marrakech, Morocco, on the 27th of May 2008. The JURIX 2008 Workshop on “the Natural Language Engineering of Legal Argumentation: Language, Logic, and Computation (NaLEA)”, which focussed on recent advances in natural language engineering and legal argumentation. The ICAIL 2009 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”, the former focussing on Legal Knowledge Representation with particular emphasis on the issue of ontology acquisition from legal texts, the latter tackling issues related to legal argumentation and linguistic technologies.

To continue this momentum, a 3rd Workshop on “Semantic Processing of Legal Texts” is being organised at the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference to bring to the attention of the broader LR/HLT 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.
The main goals of the workshop 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 LRs and HLTs and their applications.

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:

• 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
• 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 arguments into a logical formalism
• Linguistically-orientied XML mark up of legal arguments
• Dialogue protocols for argumentation
• Legal argument ontology
• Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural language
• Controlled language systems for law.

Submissions

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, 2010. The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF. Submission will be electronic using START paper submission software available at

SPLeT 2010 Workshop

Note that when submitting a paper through the START page, authors will be kindly asked to provide relevant information about the resources that have been used for the work described in their paper or that are the outcome of their research. In this way, authors will contribute to the LREC2010 Map, our new feature for LREC 2010. For further information on this initiative, please refer to

LREC2010 Map of Language Resources

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: 10 February 2010
Acceptance notification sent: 5 March 2010
Final version deadline: 21 March 2010
Workshop date: 23 May 2010

Workshop Chairs

• Enrico Francesconi (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica of CNR, Florence, Italy)
• Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of CNR, Pisa, Italy)
• Wim Peters (Natural Language Processing Research Group, University of Sheffield, UK)
• Adam Wyner (Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK)

Address any queries regarding the workshop to: lrec10_legalWS@ilc.cnr.it

Program Committee

• Johan Bos (University of Rome, Italy)
• Danièle Bourcier (Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany)
• Thomas R. Bruce (Cornell Law School, Ithaca, NY, USA)
• Pompeu Casanovas (Institut de Dret i Tecnologia, UAB, Barcelona, Spain)
• Alessandro Lenci (Dipartimento di Linguistica, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy)
• Leonardo Lesmo (Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Torino, Italy)
• Raquel Mochales Palau (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
• Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de Évora, Portugal)
• Erich Schweighofer (Universität Wien, Rechtswissenschaftliche Fakultät, Wien, Austria)
• Manfred Stede (University of Potsdam, Germany)
• Daniela Tiscornia (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica of CNR, Florence, Italy)
• Tom van Engers (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• Radboud Winkels (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

IMPACT is an international project, partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th framework programme. It will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. To support the analysis of policy proposals in an inclusive way which respects the interests of all stakeholders, research on tools for reconstructing arguments from data resources distributed throughout the Internet will be conducted. The key problem is translation from these sources in natural language to formal argumentation structures, which will be input for automatic reasoning.

My role will be to set up a Ph.D. research project concerning the key problem. This is based on an unsuccessful larger research proposal that I made with Tom. I’ll be organising the database, the literature, some of the software, and outlining the approach the student would take. I’ll make notes on the progress as it happens.

I’m looking forward to living for a while in Amsterdam, working with Tom and my other colleagues at the center — Joost Breuker, Rinke Hoekstra, Emile de Maat. The Netherlands also has a very lively Department of Argumentation Theory. As an added bonus, my colleagues from Linguistics, Susan Rothstein and Fred Landman, are in Amsterdam on sabbatical. Will be a very interesting and fun period.

The following people attended:

• Andras Forhecz, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
• Ales Gola, Ministry of Interior of Czech Republic
• Harold Hoffman, University Krems, Austria
• Czeslaw Jedrzejek, Poznan University of Technology, Poland
• Manuel Maarek, INRIA Grenoble, Rhone-Alpes
• Michael Sonntag, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
• Vit Stastny, Ministry of Interior of Czech Republic

I thank the participants for their comments and look forward to continuing the discussions which we started in the tutorial.

At the link, one can find the slides. Comments are very welcome. The file is 2.2MB. The slides were originally prepared using Open Office’s Impress, then converted to PowerPoint.

Natural Language Processing Techniques for Managing Legal Resources on the Semantic Web

There is a bit more in the slides than was presented at the tutorial, covering in addition ontologies, parsers, and semantic interpreters.

In the coming weeks, I will make available additional detailed instructions as well as gazetteers and JAPE rules. I also plan to continue to add additional text mining materials.

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

Below, I briefly outline ideas concerning taxonomies and legal rules. Then, I present and comment on the points Sherwin brings to the fore.

Taxonomies
Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification of items in a hierarchical IS-A relationship, where the items can be most anything. The IS-A relationship is also understood as subtypes or supertypes. For example, a car is a subtype of vehicle, and a Toyota is a subtype of car; we can infer that a Toyota is a subtype of vehicle. Each subtype has more specific properties than the supertype. In some taxonomies, one item may be a subtype of several supertypes; for example, a car is both a subtype of vehicle and a subtype of objects made of metal, however, not all vehicles are made of metal, nor are all things made from metal vehicles, which indicates that these types are distinct. Taxonomies are more specific than the related term ontologies, for which a range of relationships beyond the IS-A relationship may hold among the items such as is owned by or similar. In addition, ontologies generally introduce properties of elements in the class, e.g. colour, engine type, etc. Classifications in scientific domains such as Biology or Linguistics is intensely debated and revised. It would be expected that this would be even more so true in the legal domain which is comprised of intellectual evidence rather than empirical evidence as in the physical sciences and where the scientific method is not applied.

Legal Rules
First, let us be clear about what a legal rule is with a clear example following Professor David E. Sorkin’s example . A legal rule is a rule which determines whether some proposition holds (say of an individual) contingent on other propositions (the premises). For example, the state of Illinios assault statute specifies: “A person commits an assault when, without lawful authority, he engages in conduct which places another in reasonable apprehension of receiving a battery.” (720 ILCS 5/12-1(a)). We can analyse this into the legal rule:

A person commits assault if
1. the person engages in conduct;
2. the person lacks lawful authority for the conduct;
3. the conduct places another in apprehension of receiving a battery; and
4. the other person’s apprehension is reasonable.

Optimally, each of the premises in a rule should be simple and be answerable as true or false. In this example, where all four premises are true, the conclusion, that the person committed assault, is true.

There are significant issues even with such simple examples since each of the premises of a legal rule may itself be subject to further dispute and consideration; the premises may be subjective (e.g. was the conduct intentional), admit degrees of truth (e.g. degree of emotional harm), or application of the rule may be subject to mitigating or aggravating circumstances. The determination of the final claim follows the resolution of these subsidiary disputes and considerations. In addition, some legal rules need not require all of the premises to be true, but allow a degree of counterbalancing evaluation of the terms.

The Sources of Legal Rules
Sherwin outlines the sources of the rules:

Posited rules, which are legal rules as explicitly given by a legal authority such as a judge giving a legal decision.
Attributed rules, which are legal rules that are drawn from a legal decision by a legal researcher rather than by a legal authority in a decision. The rule is implicit in the other aspects of the report of the case.
Ideal rules, which are rules that are ‘ideal’ relative to some criteria of ideality, say morally or economically superior rules.

Purposes of Classification
In addition, we have the purposes or uses of making a classification of legal rules.

Facilitating the discussion and use of law.
Supporting the critical evaluation of law
Influencing legal decision-making

In the first purpose, the rules are sorted into classes, which helps to understand and manage legal information. In Sherwin’s view, this is the most basic, formal, and least ambitious goal, yet it relies on having some taxonomic logic in the first place. The second purpose, the rules are evaluated to determine if they are serving the intended purpose as well as to identify gaps or inconsistencies. As Sherwin points out, the criteria of evaluation must then also be determined; however, this then relates to the criteria which guides the taxonomy in the first place, a topic we touch on below. The final purpose is a normative one, where the classification identifies the normal circumstances under which a rule applies, thereby also clarifying those circumstances in which the rule does not apply. Sherwin points out that legal scholars vary in which purpose they find attractive and worth pursuing.

While I can appreciate that some legal scholars might not find the ‘formal’ classification of interest, I view it from a different perspective. First, any claim concerning the normative application of one rule instead of another rest entirely on the intuitive presumption that the rules are clearly different. This is a distinction that the first level can help to clarify. Similar points can be made for other relationships among rules. Second, focusing on the latter stage does not help to say specifically why one rule means what it does and has the consequences as intended; yet surely this is in virtue of the specific ‘content’ of the rule, which again is clarified by a thorough going analysis at the first stage. Third, if there is going to be any progress in applied artificial intelligence and law, it will require the analytical elements defined at the first stage. Fourth, as the study of Linguistics has shown, close scrutiny at the first stage can help to reveal very issues and problems that are fundamental to all higher stages. Fifth, providing even a small, clear sample of legal arguments analysed along other lines of the first stage can give the community of legal scholars a common ‘pool’ of legal arguments to fruitfully consider at the later stages; along these lines, it is notable how few concrete, detailed examples Sherwin’s paper discusses. Not surprisingly, some of the issues Sherwin raises about the purposes of different ‘levels’ of analysis also appear in the linguistic literature. In my view, though the first stage may not be interesting to most legal professionals, there are very good reasons why it should be.

Criteria of Taxonomy
Several different criteria which guide the taxonomy of legal rules are discussed.

Intuitive similarity: whether researchers claim that two rules are subtypes of one another.
Evolutionary history: the legal rule is traced in the history of the law.
Formal classification: the logical relations among categories of the law.
Function based: a function from the problem to a set of solutions.
Reason based: the higher-level reasons that explain or justify a rule.

Sherwin criticises judgements based on intuitive similarity since the taxonomers may be relying on false generalisations rather than their own intuitions and that intuition can be arbitrary and without reason. This is also the sort of criticism leveled at large segment of linguistic research and which has been shown to be misleading. Of course, one must watch false classifications and try to provide a justification for classifying one element in one class and not another. One way to do this is, as in psycholinguistics, is to provide tests run over subjects. Another way is to refine the sorts of observations that lead to classifications. In general, all that we currently know about language, from dictionaries, to grammars, to inference rules is based on linguistic intuitions. Some, such as the rules of propositional logic, have been so fixed that they now seem to exist independent of any linguistic basis.

The issue here is somewhat related to classification by formal logical relations. It is unclear what Sherwin thinks logical relations are and how they are applied. What we do have more clarity on are some of the criteria for such a formal taxonomy: accounting for all legal materials, a strict hierarchy, consistent interpretation of classes, and no overlap of categories. This is but one way to consider a formal hierarchy; indeed, there is a separate and very interesting question about what formal model of classification best suits a legal taxonomy. Yet, this issue is not explored in the article.

The function based approach seems to have meta categories. For example, the rule above can be seen as a function from circumstances to a classification of a person as having committed an assault. However, this is not what appears to be intended in Sherwin’s discussion. Rather, there are meta-functional categories depending on higher level problems and solutions. The examples given are Law as a Grievance-Remedial Instrument and Law as an Administrative-Regulatory Instrument. For me, this is not quite as clear as Sherwin makes it appear.

The reason approach organises rules according to an even higher-level of the rule — the justification or explanation of the rule. Some of the examples are that a wrongful harm imposes an obligation for redress, deterring breaches of promises facilitate exchange, or promoting public safety. In my view, these are what people (e.g. Professor Bench-Capon) in AI and Law would call values which are promoted by the legal rule. Sherwin discusses several different ways that reason based classification is done: intended, attributed, and ideal rationales. In my view, the claimed differences are not all that clear or crucial to the classification. In some cases, the rationale of a legal rule is given by the adjudicator. However, where this is not so, the rationale is implicit and must be interpreted, which is to give the intended rationale. In other cases, legal researchers examine a body of law and provide rationales, which is the attributed rationale. In this sense, the intended and attributed rationales are related (both interpreted), but achieved by different methods (study of one case versus study of a body of cases and considerations about the overall purpose of the law). Finally, there are ideal rationales, which set out broad, ideal goals of the legal rule, which may or may not be ‘ideally’ achievable. In this, the difference between intended/attributed and ideal is whether the rationale is analysed out of cases (bottom-up) or provided legislatively (top-down). In the end, the result is similar — legal rules are classified with respect to some rationale. The general problem with any such rationale is just how it is systematically given and itself justified so as to be consistent and not to yield conflicting interpretations of the same legal rule. Finally, Sherwin seems to think that there is some intrinsic conflict or tension between formal classification and reason based classification. I don’t agree. Rather, the difference is in the properties and methods being employed to make the classification, which are not inherently in conflict. Likely, a mixed approach will yield the most insights.

Copyright © 2009 Adam Wyner