Language Logic Law Software

The IMPACT Project that I am part of (at the University of Leeds) has some presentations coming up at the Online Deliberation Emerging Tools workshop (Leeds, 30 June) at the Conference on Online Deliberation (Leeds, 30 June–2 July). Interesting stuff (IMHO).

The program, including three members of the IMPACT Project — Ann Macintosh (who I work with at Leeds), Tom Gordon, and Sanjay Modgil.

9.30 Welcome: Simon Buckingham Shum (Open U. UK)
9.40 Tim van Gelder (Austhink Consulting, AUS — bCisive Online & MS Word Argumentation)
10.05 Paul Culmsee (Seven Sigma Business Solutions, AUS — Compendium case study)
10.30 Nikos Karacapilidis (U. Patras, GR — CoPe_it!)
10.55 Anna De Liddo & Simon Buckingham Shum (Open U., UK — Compendium/Cohere)
11.20 Refreshments
11.45 Mark Snaith (U. Dundee, UK — OVAview)
12.10 David Price (Debategraph, UK — Debategraph)
12.35 Sanjay Modgil (U. Liverpool, UK — Parmenides)
12.55 Any brief comments on the morning, continuing into lunch chats…
1.00 Lunch
2.15 Ann Macintosh (U. Leeds, UK) and Tom Gordon (Fraunhofer FOKUS, DE — Impact Project)
2.35 Mark Klein (MIT, USA — Deliberatorium)
3.00 Rob Ennals (Intel Labs, USA — DisputeFinder)
3.25 Refreshments
4.00 Closing discussion: did we go forwards?…
4.45 End

Last week, I attended the 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law in Barcelona, Spain. Tuesday-Thursday were given to the main conference while Monday and Friday were for workshops. This post makes a few remarks about the workshops.

On Monday, I attended two workshops. In the morning, I was at Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Technique (LOAIT), while in the afternoon, I attended Modeling Legal Cases, where I presented a paper An OWL Ontology for Legal Cases with an instantiation of Popov v. Hayashi. On Friday, I was at the morning workshop which I organized with Tom van Engers Natural Language Engineering of Legal Argumentation (NaLELA), where I presented a paper by Tom and I where we outline our approach to engineering argumentation.

At LOAIT, we heard reports about ongoing projects to provide legal taxonomies or ontologies for mediation, norms, business process specification, legislative markup, and acquisition of ontologies. Most of this work is still in the research phase, though some of it has been applied to samples in the domain of application.

At the modeling workshop, we heard a paper by Bex, Bench-Capon, and Atkinson about how to represent motives in an argumentation framework. Basically the idea is to make the notion of motives something explicit by putting it as a node in an argumentation graph; as such, the motives can be attacked and reasoned with. Trevor Bench-Capon modeled dimensions in property law in an argumentation framework. This paper was particularly helpful to me to finally get a grip on what dimensions are; in effect, they are finer-grained factors with an ordering over them. For example, possession ranges from an animal roaming free, a chase being started, hot pursuit, mortally wounding the animal, to actual bodily possession. In another paper, Trevor modeled a set of US Supreme Court cases, raising a series of important questions about how the reasoning of the Supreme Court could be modeled. Douglas Walton’s paper gave some samples of argumentation schemes. Henry Prakken presented an analysis in his argumentation framework of a case concerning disability assessment. Finally Kevin Ashley gave an overview of some aspects of legal case based reasoning which, he claims, ought to have some ontological representation. This paper is relevant to my research on ontologies as Kevin pointed out a range of elements which may be considered for inclusion in an ontology. My main reservation is that there ought to be some clear distinction between the ontology (domain knowledge) and the rules that apply to the elements of the ontology.

More information about the NaLELA workshop can be found at the website for Natural Language Engineering of Argumentation.

There were three other workshops I did not have time to attend — the workshop on E-discovery/E-disclosure, privacy and protection in web-based social networks, legal and negotiation decision support systems.

I have a new article in Legal Technology:

Text-Mining Case Law

This article focuses on text-mining in the case base.

Comments welcome!

Adam

In common law systems such as in the US and the UK, cases which have been decided by judges (precedents) play a critical role in determinations of current, undecided cases. One of the critical reasoning principles in case based reasoning is stare decisis, which is a principle of legal conservatism — current decisions should adhere to or abide by past decisions unless specifically overturned. It is critical then to be able to identify not only what precedents bear on the current case, but also whether those precedents still represent good law, that is, legal decisions which have not been overturned. The legal researcher must search through the case base identifying those good precedents.

Shepard’s Citations is a compilation of court opinions and the relationships among the cases. To examine a current case in light of precedents is called Shepardization. An online tutorial can be found at:

How to Shepardize

An article from the journal Artificial Intelligence bearing on aspects of automated shepardization is:

Information extraction from case law and retrieval of prior cases

In the 1990s, there was an coordinated effort by a spectrum of individuals and organisations such as Ralph Nader of the Consumer’s Union and Prof. Carole Hafner of Northeastern University to gain free access to legal information. This was called the Taxpayer Assets Project (TAP) (also referred to as the JURIS system or The Crown Jewels). An initial story is:

Taxpayer Assets Project

Two documents by Prof. Hafner on TAP:

Letter to Reno

Competition for Legal Information

And a summary of how the Clinton administration did not support the development of JURIS:

Decision not to support JURIS

Articles about recent efforts along the same lines can be found at News Media links.

Held at the International Conference on AI and Law
June 8-12 2009, Barcelona, Spain

Workshop date: June 12, 2009

The aim of this workshop is to draw together researchers around the issues of the empirical analysis, formalisation, and implementation of legal argumentation in natural language. Such a system would be a decision-support tool which translates natural language arguments into and out of an argumentation framework or logic which supports reasoning and inference. As the interface is in natural language, the tool would be accessible to a wide range of end-users. The workshop builds on recent advances in natural language engineering and argumentation including: controlled languages, predictive editors, text mining and corpus analysis, natural language parsing, ontology construction, translation of natural language sentences into first order logic, logical inference, linguistic analysis of argumentation, and computational theories of argumentation. It draws on an interdisciplinary community in Computer Science, Linguistics, and the Law.

While argumentation can be addressed in a broad range of areas, the workshop focusses particularly on the language, logic, and computation of legal argumentation such as that found between lawyers arguing a case before a court or found in legal briefs and decisions where justifications are given for and against a decision.

For further information and submission, see NaLELA 09