Last CFP: LOAIT 2009

Apologies for cross-posts

LOAIT '09
3rd Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques
joint with
2nd Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts
June 8th, 2009, Barcelona, Spain

held in conjunction with ICAIL-09
Paper submission: April 3rd, 2009

Over the last years the management of legal information has been  
significantly influenced by approaches from Artificial Intelligence  
(AI). In particular, legal reasoning, advanced semantic and cross- 
language legal information retrieval, legal drafting and document  
classification, have proved to be fertile areas where ontologies are  
successfully applied.

The ways in which ontologies are developed and used, can be  
characterised as either bottom-up or top-down. The two methodologies  
are usually targeted towards different aspects of legal information.  
For instance, machine learning techniques are used for legal document  
classification, legal information retrieval, legal knowledge discovery  
and extraction; similarly Natural Language Processing technology has  
been successfully implemented to extract knowledge from legal texts.  
As the use of these techniques becomes more widespread, it also  
becomes clearer how to enhance their performance. One way of doing  
this is to employ structured (domain) knowledge to reduce complexity  
and support correct reasoning. Legal ontologies play a crucial role in  
providing such knowledge at various levels of specificity and formality.
On the other hand, legal knowledge representation addresses key issues  
related to the support of legal reasoning. Here, ontologies play the  
role of a shared vocabulary or of a (formal) conceptualisation of  
legal notions. These ontologies often stand in the tradition of legal  
theory and philosophy, but may be grounded in common sense as well.

The LOAIT workshop aims to offer an overview of theories and well- 
founded applications that combine Legal Ontologies and AI techniques.  
The workshop will constitute a valuable opportunity for researchers  
and practitioners in AI, AI&Law, Legal Ontologies and related fields  
to discuss problems, exchange information and compare perspectives.
The first and second editions of the LOAIT Workshop, held in  
conjunction with ICAIL’05 and ICAIL’07, provided a valuable  
opportunity for researchers and practitioners in Artificial  
Intelligence and Law to discuss problems, exchange information and  
compare perspectives on Legal Ontologies and their automatic use.

A selection of papers of LOAIT '07 were published in the volume J.  
Breuker, P. Casanovas, M. Klein, E. Francesconi (eds.) Law, Ontologies  
and Semantic Web (IOS Press, 2009), collecting state-of-the-art  
contributions on legal ontologies. These results point at an  
increasing interest of the larger AI&Law community in the study and  
the use of Legal Ontologies as well as in Natural Language  
Technologies for legal information extraction.
Recently ontology learning approaches for the legal domain were  
discussed in the LREC 2008 Workshop on "Semantic Processing of Legal  
Texts", and selected contributions will be published in a Springer  
volume (Francesconi E., Montemagni S., Peters W., Tiscornia D.  
(eds.)). These results pointed, and still do, at an increasing  
interest of the larger AI&Law community in the study and the use of  
Legal Ontologies.

In this third edition of LOAIT, we would like to focus our attention  
on two main research area: Legal Knowledge Representation as a top- 
down approach, and Ontology Learning from Legal Texts as a bottom-up  
approach on legal ontologies. Authors are invited to submit papers  
describing original completed work, work in progress, interesting  
problems, use cases or research trends related to one or more of the  
topics of interest listed below. Submitted papers will be refereed by  
two experts based on originality, significance and technical soundness.

Topics of Interest include but are not limited to:

     * Knowledge discovery and organization by AI approaches
     * Design Patterns in Legal Ontologies
     * Ontologies, Legal Standards and machine learning
     * Ontologies and machine learning for classification tasks
     * Text Categorization and Ontology
     * AI techniques on legal standards
     * Ontologies and Semantic Web
     * Legal Ontologies for Semantic Web Services
     * Ontology learning from legal texts, including sub-areas such as  
ontology customization, ontology merging, ontology extension, ontology  
evolution, etc.
     * Ontology Matching
     * Lexicons for Legal Applications (Information Retrieval, Legal  
Drafting)
     * Natural Language Processing and Legal Ontologies
     * Natural Language Processing and Legal Information Retrieval and  
Extraction
     * Information Extraction from legal texts
     * Engineering of regulatory ontologies: conceptual analysis,  
representation, modularization and layering, reusability, evolution  
and dynamics, etc.
     * Multilingual and terminological aspects of regulatory ontologies
     * Ontological views on models of legal reasoning: regulatory  
compliance, case-based reasoning, reasoning with uncertainty, etc.
     * Experiences with projects and applications involving regulatory  
ontologies in legal knowledge based systems, legal information  
retrieval, e-governments, e-commerce
     * Modeling legal norms, concepts, rules, cases, principals,  
values and procedures, methods for managing organizational change when  
introducing legal knowledge systems
     * Regulatory ontologies of property rights, persons and  
organizations, legal procedures, contracts, legal causality, etc.

Author Guidelines

     * Paper length: max. 10 pages
     * Paper format: Springer style format
     * Paper Submission:  http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=loait2009
     * Proceedings will be published in paper and electronic formats  
by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)

Important Dates

     * April 3, 2009: Paper submission
     * April 27, 2009: Notification of acceptance
     * May 4, 2009: Camera-ready paper
     * June 8, 2009: Workshop

Program Chairs

Nuria Casellas (Institute of Law and Technology, University Autonoma  
of Barcelona)
Enrico Francesconi (Institute of Legal Information Theory and  
Techniques (ITTIG-CNR) Florence, Italy)
Rinke Hoekstra (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam)
Simonetta Montemagni (Institute of Computational Linguistics (ILC- 
CNR), PISA, Italy)

Program Committee

Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, UK
V. Richard Benjamins, Telefónica R&D, Spain
Alexander Boer, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, The  
Netherland
Joost Breuker, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, The  
Netherland
Thomas Bruce, Cornell Law School, US
Paul Buitelaar, DERI research institute in Galway, Ireland
Pompeu Casanovas, Institute of Law and Technology, Universitat  
Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
Aldo Gangemi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC- 
CNR), Italy
Roberto García, Universitat de Lleida, Spain
Mustafa Jarrar, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Michael Klein, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherland
Alessandro Lenci, Department of Linguistics, University of Pisa, Italy
Wim Peters, Natural Language Processing Research Group, University of  
Sheffield, UK
Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Florence, Italy
Marco Schorlemmer, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
Erich Schweighofer, University of Vienna, Austria
Barry Smith, University at Buffalo, US
York Sure, SAP Research, Germany
Daniela Tiscornia, Institute of Legal Information Theory and  
Techniques (ITTIG-CNR), Italy
Tom van Engers, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, The  
Netherland
Réka Vas, Department of Information Systems, University Corvinus of  
Budapest, Hungary
Radboud Winkels, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, The  
Netherland


---
Drs Rinke Hoekstra

Leibniz Center for Law      |  AI Department
Faculty of Law              |  Faculty of Sciences
Universiteit van Amsterdam  |  Vrije Universiteit
Kloveniersburgwal 48        |  De Boelelaan 1081a
1012 CX  Amsterdam          |  1081 HV Amsterdam
+31-(0)20-5253499           |  +31-(0)20-5987752
hoekstra@uva.nl             |  hoekstra@few.vu.nl

Homepage: http://www.leibnizcenter.org/users/rinke

Received on Tuesday, 31 March 2009 07:50:59 UTC