Semantic Processing of Legal Texts Workshop

In this post you will find information on the Semantic Processing of Legal Texts workshop, held in conjunction with the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. Below please find a link to the conference, information on the workshop, and a program for the conference.
LREC
Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, May 17-23, Malta.
LREC 2010 Workshop on
SEMANTIC PROCESSING OF LEGAL TEXTS (SPLeT-2010)
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.
Over the last two years, a number of dedicated workshops and tutorials specifically focusing 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 Language 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 focused 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 focusing 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 LREC 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 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-oriented 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

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)

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)

Stephan Walter (Euroscript, Luxembourg S.a.r.l.)

Radboud Winkels (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Program

14:30-14:45 Welcome and introduction

14:45-15:10
A Description Language for Content Zones of German Court Decisions
Florian Kuhn

15:10-15:35
Controlling the language of statutes and regulations for semantic processing
Stefan Hoefler and Alexandra Bünzli

15:35-16:00
Named entity recognition in the legal domain for ontology population
Mírian Bruckschen, Caio Northfleet, Douglas da Silva, Paulo Bridi, Roger Granada, Renata Vieira, Prasad Rao and Tomas Sander

16:00-16:30
Coffee break

16:30-16:55
Legal Claim Identification: Information Extraction with Hierarchically Labeled Data
Mihai Surdeanu, Ramesh Nallapati and Christopher Manning

16:55-17:20
On the Extraction of Decisions and Contributions from Summaries of French Legal IT Contract Cases
Manuel Maarek

17:20-17:45
Towards Annotating and Extracting Textual Legal Case Factors
Adam Wyner and Wim Peters

17:45-18:10
Legal Rules Learning based on a Semantic Model for Legislation
Enrico Francesconi