[agents] CFP LOAIT 2010, 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques

Tue May 4 17:25:15 EDT 2010

Apologies for cross-posting

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LOAIT 2010
4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques
"Legal Concepts and Ontologies: knowledge representation, comparison, harmonization and learning"

http://www.ittig.cnr.it/loait/loait10.html

July 7th, 2010, Fiesole (Florence), Italy
Paper submission: May 3rd, 2010  (***Extended deadline: May 16th, 2010***)

held in conjunction with Deon-10
http://defeasible.org/deon2010/
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The LOAIT workshop aims to offer an overview of theories and well-founded applications that combine Legal Ontologies and AI techniques, with regard both to theories and implementations.
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 first three editions of the LOAIT Workshop were held in conjunction with ICAIL Conference ('05 (Bologna), '07 (San Francisco), '09 (Barcelona)), 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 LOAIT edition, we would like to deal with legal knowledge modelling focusing on ontologies for legal concepts description (deontic/normative notions as well as domain concepts).
Legal knowledge modelling 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.
Roles of legal ontologies will be discussed as regards different applications as multilingual document annotation and drafting, multilingual legal information retrieval, legal reasoning, case-based reasoning, legal assessment, legal concepts comparison and harmonization as well as ontology learning. The ways in which ontologies are developed and used (as either bottom-up or top-down) will be addressed as well.
The workshop constitutes a valuable opportunity for researchers and practitioners in AI, AI&Law, Legal Ontologies and related fields to discuss problems, exchange information and compare perspectives.
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 (Multilingual Legal Information Retrieval and 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.

***Important Dates***
    * May 3rd, 2010: Paper submission   (***Extended deadline: May 16th, 2010***)
    * May 26th, 2010: Notification of acceptance (***Postponed: June 9th, 2010***)
    * June 7th, 2010: Camera-ready paper (***Postponed: June 23rd, 2010***)
    * July 7th, 2010: Workshop

***Program Chairs***
Enrico Francesconi (Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG-CNR) Florence, Italy)
Simonetta Montemagni (Institute of Computational Linguistics (ILC-CNR), PISA, Italy)
Piercarlo Rossi (University of Oriental Piedmont, Italy)
Daniela Tiscornia (Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG-CNR) Florence, Italy)

***Program Committee***
Gian Maria Ajani, University of Turin, Italy
Tommaso Agnoloni, ITTIG-CNR, Italy
Trevor J.M. Bench-Capon, University of Liverpool, UK
V. Richard Benjamins, TelefÃ³nica R&D, Spain
Guido Boella, University of Turin, Italy
Alexander Boer, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Joost Breuker, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Thomas Bruce, Cornell Law School, US
Paul Buitelaar, DERI research institute in Galway, Ireland
Pompeu Casanovas, Institute of Law and Technology, Universitat AutÃ²noma de Barcelona, Spain
Aldo Gangemi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC-CNR), Italy
Roberto GarcÃa, Universitat de Lleida, Spain
Mustafa Jarrar, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Michael Klein, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Alessandro Lenci, Department of Linguistics, University of Pisa, Italy
Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna, 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 Netherlands
RÃ©ka Vas, Department of Information Systems, University Corvinus of Budapest, Hungary
Radboud Winkels, Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Adam Wyner, Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK 

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