Category: linguistics

EXTENDED CFP – Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT 2012)

In conjunction with
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:

  • Construction, extension, merging, customization of legal language resources, e.g. terminologies, thesauri, ontologies, corpora
  • Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts
  • Semantic annotation of legal text
  • 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 legal arguments into a logical formalism
  • Dialogue protocols for legal information processing
  • Controlled language systems for law

    • LREC Conference Information (Accommodation, Travel, Registration)
    Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 2012 (LREC 2012)
    Workshop Schedule – TBA
    Workshop Registration and Location – TBA
    Webpage URLs

  • This page is http://wyner.info/LanguageLogicLawSoftware/?p=1233
  • An alternative workshop webpage

    • Important Dates:

  • REVISED Submission: 19 February 2012
  • Acceptance Notification: 12 March 2012
  • Final Version: 30 March 2012
  • Workshop date: 27 May 2012

    • 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)
    By Adam Wyner

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

    Papers Accepted to the JURIX 2011 Conference

    My colleagues and I have had two papers (one long and one short) accepted for presentation at The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2011). The papers are available on the links.
    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

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

    Draft Materials for LEX 2011

    Draft post
    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

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

    Recent Papers

    A couple of more papers which have been accepted at upcoming conferences or workshops. The papers are all downloadable from the links provided.
    Arguing with Emotion
    Martyn Llloyd-Kelly and Adam Wyner
    UMMS July 11, Girona, Spain
    The paper at the link is a draft and will be somewhat revised for distribution at the workshop.
    Abstract
    Emotions are commonly thought to be beyond the pale of rational analysis, for they are subjective, may vary even with respect to the person experiencing the emotion, and may conflict with rational thought. In this paper, we develop the position that emotions can be the objects of argumentation, which we express by introducing emotion 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 the Linguistic Analysis of Argumentation Schemes
    Adam Wyner
    LAGB September 7-10, Manchester, United Kingdom
    This is an accepted abstract of a paper which is as yet to be written.
    By Adam Wyner
    Distributed under the Creative Commons
    Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

    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:

      Applying Human Language Technology to the Law

    Important Dates:

      Paper submission deadline: DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS EXTENDED TO APRIL 10 by 00:00 EST
      Acceptance notification sent: 15 April 2011
      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)

    Computational Argumentation on the Web with Natural Language

    Over the last four years, I have been working on topics related to computational argumentation on the web using natural language. Some of my publications and previous postings reflect these interests. Along with my colleague Tom van Engers, I prepared two research proposals on this topic, which are here presented as technical reports of our work. These reports are also relevant to the current IMPACT project, which addresses many of the same themes.
    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

    Forthcoming Article: On Controlled Natural Languages: Properties and Prospects

    I am a co-author of the forthcoming article On Controlled Natural Languages: Properties and Prospects. From the abstract:

    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.

    CFP: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts

    LREC 2010 Workshop on
    SEMANTIC PROCESSING OF LEGAL TEXTS (SPLeT-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)

    Research on Argumentation at the Leibniz Center for Law in Amsterdam

    I have a 3 month research job at the Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam starting February 1 and working with Tom van Engers. This is part of the IMPACT project:

    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.

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

    I gave a tutorial on natural language processing for legal resource management at the International Conference on Legal Information Systems (JURIX) 2009 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The slides are available below. Comments welcome.
    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