Welcome to MIREL 2017!

The aim of MIREL-2017 workshop is to bridge the gap between the community working on legal ontologies and NLP parsers and the community working on reasoning methods and formal logic, in line with the objectives of the MIREL (MIning and REasoning with Legal texts) project. The workshop aims at fostering the scientific discussion between approaches based on language technologies applied to the legal domain (representing legal knowledge) and those based on legal reasoning (using the legal knowledge to build specialized services and applications).

Organizers

Livio Robaldo

University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg)

Grigoris Antoniou

University of Huddersfield (UK)

Serena Villata

INRIA
(France)

Luigi Di Caro

University of Turin
(Italy)

Call for papers

#backgound

Legal scholars and practitioners are feeling increasingly overwhelmed with the expanding set of legislation and case law available these days, which is assuming more and more of an international character. For example, European legislation is estimated to be 170,000 pages long, of which over 100,000 pages have been produced in the last ten years. Furthermore, legislation is available in unstructured formats, which makes it difficult for users to cut through the information overload. As the law gets more complex, conflicting, and ever changing, more advanced methodologies are required for analyzing, representing and reasoning on legal knowledge.

The management of large repositories of norms, and the semantic access and reasoning to these norms are key challenges in Legal Informatics, which is experiencing growth in activity, also at the industrial level. Specifically, it is necessary to address both conceptual challenges, such as the role of legal interpretation in mining and reasoning, and computational challenges, such as the handling of big legal data, and the complexity of regulatory compliance.

Legal domain has always been attractive to language and semantic technology because of its importance for the society with respect to globalization and common markets as well as for its challenges for formalization and specific language use. For this reason, a series of workshops centered in legal informatics and related topics have been organized recently; examples are ICAIL, JURIX, and JURISIN. Furthermore, several research projects in the legal domain have been recently funded by the EU and similar institutions, among which ``MIREL: MIning and REasoning with Legal texts''.

#objective

The development of NLP techniques and semantic technologies for automatic analysis and indexing of big data freely available on the web has created opportunities for building new approaches to improve the efficiency, comprehensibility, and consistency of legal systems. Semantic analysis aims at relating syntactic elements – which could be phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, and whole documents - to their meanings in a given domain, including meanings specific to legal information. On the one hand, in recent years the EU has delivered huge amounts of resources on EU law in many languages (such as, EuroParl, JRC, etc.). On the other hand, the matured NLP and Semantic Web technology provides a good inventory: for formalizing the law data in the form of domain ontologies; for automating the process of relevant knowledge extraction from legal documents; and for representing it in form of Linked Data in RDF. This will support legal reasoning tasks such as better search possibilities, compliance checking and decision support, as well as a better presentation of the legal information to professional and non-professional stakeholders.

The aim of MIREL-2017 workshop is to bridge the gap between the community working on legal ontologies and NLP parsers and the community working on reasoning methods and formal logic, towards these objectives described above.

#submission

We invite submissions up to 12 pages plus 3 additional pages for bibliography and appendix, in LNCS format.

A selection of the best papers of the workshop will be published at LNAI Springer Series jointly with AICOL follow-up activities.

Authors shall submit their papers electronically via EasyChair at this link before the due date in PDF format.

Topics

Language technologies for processing of legal texts
Legal reasoning (searching, compliance checking, decision support)
Ontology design patterns for the legal domain
Ontological modeling of legal data
Core and domain ontologies for the legal domain
Legal knowledge on the Web
Legal Linked Open Data
Machine learning and data mining for legal applications
Adaptation of language processing modules to legal domain
Large-scale normative reasoning
Computational methods for legal reasoning
Extraction of legal Named entities - legal citations, etc.
Legal search engines - requirements, implementations, etc.
Semantic annotations for legal texts
Formal analysis of normative concepts and normative systems
Formal analysis of the semantics/pragmatics of deontic and normative expressions in natural language
Expressive vs. lightweight representations of legal knowledge
Legislation and case law corpora in Linked Open Data
Applications in the legal domain

Important dates

Paper submission (extended): 5th May 2017

Notification to authors: 20th May, 2017

Camera-ready: 1st June 2017

Workshop date: 16th June 2017

Program

9.00 - 9.15: Welcome

Session 1 - Normative modeling (Chair: Guillaume Aucher)

9.15 - 10.05: Marcello Ceci. Legal Patterns for Different Constitutive Rules.

10.05 - 10.30: Giovanni Sileno, Alexander Boer, and Tom van Engers. A Petri net-based notation for normative modeling: evaluation on deontic paradoxes.

10.30 - 11.00: Coffee break

Session 2 - Argumentation and Decision Making (Chair: Giovanni Casini)

11.00 - 11.25: Guillaume Aucher, Annie Foret, Jean-Baptiste Lenhof, Francois Schwarzentruber. Principles for a judgement editor based on Multi-BDDs.

11.25 - 11.50: Ryuta Arisaka, Ken Satoh and Leon van der Torre. Abstract Agent Argumentation (Triple-A).

11:50 - 12.15: Beishui Liao and Leendert van der Torre. Defense semantics of argumentation: encoding reasons for accepting arguments.

12:15 - 12:40: Karl Branting, Alexander Yeh, Brandy Weiss, Elizabeth Merkhofer and Bradford Brown. Inducing Predictive Models for Decision Support in Administrative Adjudication.

12.45 - 14.00: Lunch break

14:00 - 15:00: Invited speaker -- Joris Hulstijn (Chair: Leon van der Torre)

Dialogues for Contract Monitoring: a new approach to data protection

Abstract. Current legal frameworks for data protection have a number of flaws. The notion of informed consent does not work in practice. Legislation only covers personal data, but it doesn’t cover data about groups and it doesn’t cover conditions on usage of data for certain purposes. Regulatory agencies have little capacity. End-users play no role in the supervision. On the other hand, we observe that many business models are based on personal data. Access to data should therefore be seen as a counteroffer in a contract. We need a different approach to data protection that addresses the needs of end-users. In this lecture, I will sketch a dialogue framework to facilitate contract negotiations and monitoring, in the application domain of data protection. The idea is to empower end-users to negotiate better terms and conditions in their contracts, monitor compliance, and challenge the data controller in case of breaches of contract. That means that in addition to the current legal framework for data protection, which is generally based on public law, we suggest to use private law as the legal framework of choice. In addition, we discuss a governance structure to enable effective enforcement. Based on this framework, we will propose a research agenda. We need linguistically motivated notions to characterise the problem, because essentially, it involves a problem of interpretation. How to account for differences in background during contract negotiations? What counts as evidence of a breach of contract? How can legal terms and conditions be explained to the general public? We also need formal reasoning techniques, to solve the deontic epistemic puzzles triggered by data protection. For instance, suppose I give permission that my data be used for purpose P (improve healthcare). The controller argues that P implies Q (sell medicine). Is the controller allowed to use my data for purpose Q?

Session 3 - Ontologies and Computational linguistics for the legal domain (Chair: TBA)

15:00 - 15.25: Cristian Cardellino, Milagro Teruel, Raphaël Gazzotti, Laura Alonso Alemany, Serena Villata and Catherine Faron-Zucker. Bottom-up enrichment of top-down ontologies through annotation.

15.30 - 16.00: Coffee break

16.00 - 16.25: Sean Goltz and Michael Mayo. Enhancing Regulatory Compliance by Using Artificial Intelligence Text Mining to Identify Penalty Clauses in Legislation.

16:25 - 16:50: Mirna El Ghosh and Habib Abdulrab. Application of Ontology Modularization for Building a Criminal Domain Ontology.

16:50 - 17:15: Chiseung Soh, Seungtak Lim, Kihyun Hong and Young-Yik Rhim. Ontology Modeling for Criminal Law.

Workshop organizers

Co-chairs

Livio Robaldo - University of Luxembourg (Lux)

Grigoris Antoniou - University of Huddersfield (UK)

Serena Villata - INRIA (France)

Luigi Di Caro - University of Turin (Italy)

Program commitee

Kolawole J. ADEBAYO (Univ. of Turin, Italy – LAST-JD PhD Erasmus Mundus Programme)

Laura ALONSO ALEMANY (Univ. of Cordoba, Argentina)

Cesare BARTOLINI (Univ. of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)

Valerio BASILE (INRIA, France)

Sotiris BATSAKIS (Univ. of Huddersfield, UK)

Guido BOELLA (Univ. of Turin, Italy)

Nick BASSILIADES (Aristotle Univ., Greece)

Antonis BIKAKIS (Univ. College London, UK)

Cristian CARDELLINO (Univ. of Cordoba, Argentina)

Pompeu CASANOVAS (Univ. autonoma of Barcelona, Spain – Deakin Univ., Australia)

Giovanni CASINI (Univ. of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)

Luca CERVONE (Univ. of Bologna - CIRSFID, Italy)

Cleo CONDORAVDI (Stanford University, USA)

Francesco DRAICCHIO (Univ. of Bologna - CIRSFID, Italy)

Wolfgang FABER (Univ. of Huddersfield, UK)

Giovanni LABOCCETTA (DLVSystem, Italy)

Beishui LIAO (Zhejiang University, China)

Tommie MEYER (Univ. of Cape Town and CAIR, South Africa)

Monica PALMIRANI (Univ. of Bologna - CIRSFID, Italy)

Antonino ROTOLO (Univ. of Bologna - CIRSFID, Italy)

Ken SATOH (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)

Guillermo SIMARI (Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina)

Clara SMITH (National University of La Plata, Argentina)

Ilias TACHMAZIDIS (Univ. of Huddersfield, UK)

Milagro TERUEL (Univ. of Cordoba, Argentina)

Bas TESTERINK (Univ. of Utrecht, Netherlands)

Leon VAN DER TORRE (Univ. of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)

Ivan VARZINCZAK (Univ. Artois & CNRS, France)

Serena VILLATA (INRIA, France)

Xavier PARENT (Univ. of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)