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:

– 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:

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:

The results of the study would be useful to:

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:

Facts – legal and procedural facts:

Indexes – various indicative information:

Issues – the issues before the court:

Legal Roles – the role of the parties in the case:

Other – relevant information not covered by the other annotations.

Procedural History – the disposition of the case with respect to the lower court(s):

Reasoning Outcomes – various parts of the legal decision:

– 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:

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. The link (takes a moment to load) — Case Annotation Instructional Video

After reading this blog, viewing the instructional video, and receiving your username and password, you can login to begin annotating at — GATE Teamware

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 — TO APPEAR

– 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 –

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, to be frank, 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.

– Paper –

If you are interested in some of the ideas behind this project, please see our paper:

Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware

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.

A shortlink to this blog page is:
http://wyner.info/LanguageLogicLawSoftware/?p=1315

– Thanks for collaborating! –
– If you have any questions, please submit a comment! –

Crowdsourced Legal Case Annotation by Adam Wyner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Modelling Policy-making

Special Issue Editors

Adam Wyner, University of Liverpool, adam@wyner.info
Neil Benn, University of Leeds, n.j.l.benn@leeds.ac.uk

Paper Submission Deadline: May 28, 2012

We invite submission of papers on modelling policy-making. Below we outline the intended audience, context, the topics of interest, and submission details.

Context

We live in an age where citizens are beginning to demand greater transparency and accountability of their political leaders. Furthermore, those who govern and decide on policy are beginning to realise the need for new governance models that emphasise deliberative democracy and promote widespread public participation in all phases of the policy-making cycle: 1) agenda setting, 2) policy analysis, 3) lawmaking, 4) 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.

Special Issue Theme

The editors invite submissions of original research about the application of ICT and Computer Science to the first three phases of the policy cycle – agenda setting, policy analysis, and lawmaking. The research should seek to address the gap noted above. The journal volume focusses 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. While submissions about tool development and practice are welcome, the editors particularly encourage submission of articles that address formal, conceptual, and/or computational issues. Some specific topics within the theme are:

• 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

Submission Details:

Authors are invited to submit an original, previously unpublished, research paper of up to 30 pages pertaining to the special issue theme. The paper should follow the journal’s instructions for authors and be submitted online. See the dropdown tab under the section FOR AUTHORS AND EDITORS.

Instructions for Authors on:
https://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/10506

Submit Online on:
https://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/10506

Each submitted paper will be carefully peer-reviewed based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of exposition and relevance for the journal.

The shortlink to this webpage is:
http://wyner.info/LanguageLogicLawSoftware/?p=1258

A PDF version of this CFP:
CFP – Modelling Policy-making

Contact the special issue editors with any questions.

Aims

Agenda

Presentations of some current EU FP7 Projects

Policy making and the real world

Presentations of three new Interreg IVC projects with South Yorkshire partners covering sharing of current best practice in environmental policy making, set in a wider vision for Sheffield.

What Next?

Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 2012 (LREC 2012)

27 May, 2012
Istanbul, Turkey

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:

LREC Conference Information (Accommodation, Travel, Registration)

Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 2012 (LREC 2012)

Workshop Schedule – TBA

Workshop Registration and Location – TBA

Webpage URLs

Important Dates:

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. See the style guidelines and files on the LREC site:

Authors’ Kit and Templates

Submit papers to:

Submission for the workshop uses the START submission system at:

https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/LegalTexts2012/

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

– Adam

Wim Peters and I ran a pilot experiment in online, collaborative annotation for legal case factors. The slides are below. Now that we know more about how to present such materials, we need to find a cooperative population of law students to scale up and deepen the work.

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