I’m giving a talk tomorrow, April 11 2011, at BILETA, the annual conference of the British & Irish Law, Education and Technology Association at Manchester Metropolitan University School of Law. My collaborators are Wim Peters (University of Sheffield) and Fiona Beveridge (University of Liverpool).
The abstract and slides are below:
Web-based Software Tools to Support Students’ Empirical Study of the Law
Adam Wyner (University of Liverpool, Computer Science), Wim Peters (University of Sheffield, Computer Science), and Fiona Beveridge (University of Liverpool, Law School)
The paper investigates and proposes tools to support students in empirically investigating legal cases using text analytic software. Web-based tools can be used to engage and leverage the collective skills and ambitions of law students to crowd-source the development of legal resource materials. Law school students must develop skills in close textual analysis of legal source material such as legal cases. To use source material such as case decisions to reason about how precedents apply in case-based reasoning, law students must learn to identify a range of elements in legal cases, for example, parties, jurisdiction, material facts, legislative and case citations, cause of action, ratio decideni, and others. Moreover, students should be able to address complex queries to a case or a case base (a corpus of cases) in order to answer questions of particular legal interest; for example, about relationships between a judge, parties, cause of action, and ratio. Currently students either simply rely on their own analytic abilities to read a case or find answers to questions; legal search tools (e.g. Lexis-Nexis) provide search support, but are restricted to a limited number of coarse-grained parameters and cannot search for deep, particular semantic relationships in the text. To enable automated support of queries of the corpus, and so enable deep empirical research on cases, it is essential to have a corpus of legal cases which are annotated with machine readable (XML) tags that signal the semantic properties of passages of text. To create such a corpus requires a tool to annotate the text. Such a tool would reinforce students’ examination of the source document. The paper describes recent developments of tools using Semantic Web technologies, text analysis, and web-based annotation support. With the text analysis software, General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE), which is customised for legal applications, law students can annotate legal cases for a fine-grained range of legally relevant concepts and linguistic relations; they can also use GATE to write grammars and automatically annotate the text. Using GATE TeamWare, an online text annotation tool that automatically evaluates interannotator agreement, students can collaboratively analyse and agree on a gold standard corpus of legal cases. The corpus can be automatically indexed using Lucene, thereby allowing fast results to complex queries over any string or annotation used.
The slides of the talk are here
Author: Adam Wyner
Workshop on Argumentation and Case-based Reasoning at ICCBR Sept 12-15, 2011
Call for Papers
Argumentation and Case-based Reasoning (ACBR 2011)
September 12, 2011
A workshop at
ICCBR 2011: The International Conference on Case-based Reasoning, September 12-15, 2011
Greenwich, London, United Kingdom
Overview:
Case-based reasoning is standardly formalised as having four-steps – retrieve, reuse, revise, and retain. In this formalisation, there is little scope for debate. However, in domains such as law, medicine, and product selection, participants (lawyers, doctors, or consumers) may argue for or against a given legal determination, clinical treatment plan, or product choice based on what is retrieved from the case base, how the cases are reused, and what revisions are made to a case. The participants must not only justify their argument, but also defend it against counter-arguments; as well, subsidiary arguments must be justified and defended. Moreover, the information in the case base may be incomplete; different individuals to the dispute may hold alternative views, values, or consumer-oriented goals; and the reasoning itself may only be plausible rather than certain. Given this, we resort to defeasible argumentation on information derived from the case base, where claims only presumptively follow from premises and reasoning about the overall ‘network’ of arguments can be related to alternative contexts or audiences. At the end of the reasoning process, some decision must be made, which may vary depending on audiences.
Recent research on formalising or supporting decision-making in social systems (law, medicine, consumer discussion websites) shows the crucial role of argumentation in structuring, clarifying, and reasoning with respect to complex, possibly inconsistent information. Bringing researchers together to discuss results across domains will lead to greater understanding of commonalities or problems and forward state-of-the-art research on the intersection of and interaction between case-based reasoning and argumentation.
Intended Audence
Researchers working on Argumentation and CBR in any theoretical approach and application domain (Law, Medicine, Web-based consumer sites, Games, etc).
Areas of Interest (preliminary):
Author Guidelines:
The workshop solicits full papers and position papers. As well as fully-developed, thoroughly evaluated research, authors are welcome to submit tentative, incremental, and exploratory studies. Papers not accepted as full papers may be accepted as short research abstracts. Submissions will be evaluated by the program committee. Papers should be submitted in LNCS format, with a maximum of 10 pages. Camera-ready copies of papers have to be ready on the 25 of July 2011 (hard deadline) so that they can be included in the workshop proceedings.
Submissions should be submitted electronically in PDF to the EasyChair site by the deadline (see important dates below). As it stands now, you submit the paper via ICCBR submission page on EasyChair, submitting the paper to Workshop 6: Argumentation and Case-based Reasoning.
Publication:
Papers will appear in the proceedings of the conference workshops. Further details about publication are to follow.
Webpages:
ICCBR
Argumentation and Case-based Reasoning
Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline: 27 June 2011 by 00:00 GMT
Acceptance notification sent: 06 July 2011
Final camera-ready version deadline: 5 August 2011
Workshop date: 12 September 2011
Contact Information:
Primary contact: Adam Wyner, adam@wyner.info
Program Committee Co-Chairs:
Adam Wyner (University of Liverpool, UK)
Trevor Bench-Capon (University of Liverpool, UK)
Program Committee (preliminary):
Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh
Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool
Frans Coenen, University of Liverpool
Mehmet Goker, PriceWaterhouseCoopers
Nancy Green, University of North Carolina
Stella Heras, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia
Cindy Marling, Ohio University
David McSherry, University of Ulster
Edwina Rissland, University of Massachusetts
Maya Wardeh, University of Liverpool
Presentation at tGov on the IMPACT Project
On March 18, 2011, I gave a presentation at tGov 2011 on the IMPACT Project.
The idea behind “transformational government” (or t-government) is that new technologies will change the way that the public interacts with the operation and delivery of public services, which are web-based, joined-up, citizen-centric than in the past. See, for example, Directgov, the website for the UK government. The IMPACT Project, which relates to how public policy is made, clearly addresses some of these issues.
Follow the links for the slides of the talk A Structured Online Consultation Tool and the paper Towards a Structured Online Consultation Tool.
Argumentation for Public-Policy Making – Presentation at the Central Office of Information, United Kingdom
In October, 2010, I made a presentation on the various elements of the IMPACT Project, which aims to apply computational models of argumentation to support public-policy making, at the Central Office of Information (COI) in London, United Kingdom. The COI is the UK government’s center for marketing and communications. It works with government departments (on a contract basis) to inform and engage citizens in issues that affect their lives. The COI is under the Minister for the Cabinet Office.
This was an interesting opportunity to learn more about how the UK government gathers and delivers information to the public.
For my part, on behalf of the IMPACT Project, I was outlining the several tools which could be used to support public-policy making. I outlined several of the current tools (some of which are used by the COI), their limitations, and some of the advantages that would be gained from the IMPACT tools. The slides are IMPACT Project Presentation at the Central Office of Information.
Since that meeting (the second), I’ve been in touch with Suzannah Kinsella, Head of Public Engagement at the COI. However, the UK government has been under some reorganisation and review (see links under Review into Government Communications). Work from the IMPACT Project may be a useful part of this. In early April I shall again meet with her and another colleague at the COI to see how we can specifically move ahead in collaborating with the COI on development of the tools.
ICAIL 2011 Tutorial: Textual Information Extraction from Legal Resources Using GATE
Slides for ICAIL tutorial, Monday, June 6, 2011, University of Pittsburgh.
Textual Information Extraction from Legal Resources using GATE
Workshop Applying Human Language Technology to the Law
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 remarks
- 9:15 Jack Conrad (invited speaker). The Role of HLT in High-end Search and the Persistent Need for Advanced HLT Technologies
- 10:00 Tommaso Fornaciari and Massimo Poesio. Lexical vs. Surface Features in Deceptive Language Analysis
- 10:30 Nuria Casellas, Joan-Josep Vallbé and Thomas Bruce. Legal Thesauri Reuse. An Experiment with the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations
- 11:00 Break
- 11:15 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 mediation
- 11:45 Emile De Maat and Radboud Winkels. Formal Models of Sentences in Dutch Law
- 12:15 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 Law
- 13:15 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 CFP
- Submissions 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.
The papers from the workshop are available from here.
Webpage:
Important Dates:
- Final version deadline: 23 May 2011
- Workshop date: 10 June 2011
Contact Information:
- Primary contact: Adam Wyner, adam@wyner.info
- Secondary 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)
Proceedings and Program for Workshop on Modelling Legal Cases and Legal Rules
in conjunction with JURIX 2010
December 15, 2010
Department of Computer Science, Ashton Building, Room 310
University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom
Workshop Proceedings
Workshop Program
Session I
- 14:30-14:35
Welcome and Introductory remarks
- 14:35-15:00
Steven van Driel (Utrecht University) and Henry Prakken (Utrecht University and University of Groningen)
Visualising the argumentation structure of an expert witness report with Rationale (extended abstract)
- 15:00-15:25
Thomas F. Gordon (Fraunhofer FOKUS)
Analyzing open source license compatibility issues with Carneades
-
15:25-15:40
Martyn Lloyd-Kelly, Adam Wyner, and Katie Atkinson (University of Liverpool)
Emotional argumentation schemes in legal cases (short position paper)
-
15:40-16:00
Short informal remarks
16:00-16:30 Tea
Session II
-
16:30-16:55
Anna Ronkainen (University of Helsinki)
MOSONG, a fuzzy logic model of trade mark similarity
-
16:55-17:20
Adam Wyner and Trevor Bench-Capon (University of Liverpool)
Visualising legal case-based reasoning argumentation schemes
-
17:20-17:45
Burkhard Schafer (University of Edinburgh)
Say “cheese”: natural kinds, deontic logic and European Court of Justice decision C-210\/89
-
17:45-18:00
Short informal remarks
For general information, see JURIX 2010
By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0
Legal Know-How Workshop Presentations
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:
ISKO-UK Legal Know-How meeting
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.
By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0
Invited Speakers for JURIX 2010 in Liverpool Dec. 16-17
The invited speakers at JURIX 2010 in Liverpool Dec. 16-17 are:
- John Sheridan, Head of e-Services in the Information Policy and Services Directorate of The National Archives. John is one of the main people behind data.gov.uk and legislation.gov.uk.
- Wiebe van der Hoek, member of the Agent ART Group at the University of Liverpool. His research in agents concentrates on Logics for Agent Systems, Cooperation, Negotiation, Games and Agents, Data Mining and the Semantic Web.
I previously met John Sheridan August 2009 to discuss legislation and the semantic web; see my post. It will be very good to hear what has been going on since, particularly in the context of JURIX.
By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0
Research Associate on the IMPACT Project at University of Liverpool
As of September 13, 2010, I have been working at the University of Liverpool, Department of Computer Science with Katie Atkinson (the PI) and Trevor Bench-Capon on the IMPACT Project (previously having worked on the project at the University of Amsterdam at the Leibniz Center for Law and also at the University of Leeds at the Centre for Digital Citizenship). I previously worked with Katie and Trevor on the ESTRELLA Project.
IMPACT: Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis
The IMPACT Project is a European Framework 7 project (Grant Agreement No 247228) in the ICT for Governance and Policy Modeling theme (ICT-2009.7.3). The project runs from January 2010 to December 2013.
IMPACT 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. These models will be used to develop and evaluate innovative prototype tools for supporting open, inclusive and transparent deliberations about public policy. 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. (from Atkinson’s website).
Looking forward to working on these topics!
By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0