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

Recent Papers

My colleagues and I have had the papers below accepted for upcoming conferences. The papers are all downloadable from the links provided.
Towards a Structured Online Consultation Tool
Adam Wyner, Katie Atkinson, and Trevor Bench-Capon
ePart August 2011, Deflt, The Netherlands
Abstract
The Structured Online Consultation tool (SCT) is a component tool in the IMPACT Project which is used to construct and present detailed surveys that solicit feedback from the public concerning issues in public policy. The tool is underwritten by a computational model of argumentation, incorporating fine-grained, interconnected argumentation schemes. While the public responds to easy to understand questions, the answers can be assimilated into a structured framework for analytic purposes, supporting automated reasoning about arguments and counter-arguments.
Multi-agent Based Classifi cation Using Argumentation From Experience
Maya Wardeh, Frans Coenen, Trevor Bench-Capon, and Adam Wyner
PAKDD May 2011, Shenzhen, China
Abstract
An approach to multi-agent classi fication, using an Argumentation from Experience paradigm is describe, whereby individual agents argue for a given example to be classifi ed with a particular label according to their local data. Arguments are expressed in the form of classi fication rules which are generated dynamically. The advocated argumentation process has been implemented in the PISA multi-agent framework, which is also described. Experiments indicate that the operation of PISA is comparable with other classi fication approaches and that it can be utilised for Ordinal Classifi cation and Imbalanced Class problems.
Note: I was added to this paper to present it at the conference. I’m familiar with the argumentation aspects, but the data-mining is new to me.
Semantic Models for Policy Deliberation
Katie M. Atkinson, Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, Dan Cartwright and Adam Z. Wyner
ICAIL June 2011, Pittsburgh, USA
Abstract
Semantic models have received little attention in recent years, much of their role having been taken over by developments in ontologies. Ontologies, however, are static, and so have only a limited role in reasoning about domains in which change matters. In this paper, we focus on the domain of policy deliberation, where policy decisions are designed to change things to realise particular social values. We explore how a particular kind of state transition system can be constructed to serve as a semantic model to support reasoning about alternative policy decisions. The policy making process includes stages that support the construction of a model, which can then be exploited in reasoning. The reasoning itself will be driven by a particular argumentation scheme for practical reasoning, and the ways in which arguments based on this scheme can be attacked and evaluated. The evaluation provides alternative policy positions. The semantics underpin a current web-based implementation, designed to solicit structured feedback on policy proposals.
Towards Formalising Argumentation about Legal Cases
Adam Z. Wyner, Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, Katie M. Atkinson
ICAIL June 2011, Pittsburgh, USA
Abstract
In this paper we offer an account of reasoning with legal cases in terms of argumentation schemes. These schemes, and undercutting attacks associated with them, are expressed as defeasible rules of inference that will lend themselves to formalisation within the ASPIC+ framework. We begin by modelling the style of reasoning with cases developed by Aleven and Ashley in the CATO project, which describes cases using factors, and then extend the account to accommodate the dimensions used in Rissland and Ashley’s earlier HYPO project. Some additional scope for argumentation is then identified and formalised.
By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
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Talk at BILETA 2011

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

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):

  • Relationships between case-bases and argumentation such as argumentation schemes that are designed for particular domains.
  • The content and structure of the case-base as required by participants to the argument.
  • Examples examples and applications of case-based argumentative reasoning.

    • 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.

    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)

    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