ASAIL 2019
3rd Workshop on Automated Semantic Analysis of Information in Legal Text
June 21, 2019, Université de Montréal, Canada
June 21, 2019, Université de Montréal, Canada
Paper submission deadline: April 21, April 28, 2019
The Third Workshop on Automated Detection, Extraction and Analysis of Semantic Information in Legal Texts (ASAIL) will be held in conjunction with ICAIL 2019: XVII International Conference on AI and Law, Friday June 21st, 2019, Montreal, Canada. It is a continuation of the successful ASAIL workshops in 2015 and 2017.
This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, academic and corporate researchers, legal practitioners, and legal service providers for an extended, collaborative discussion about applying natural language processing and machine learning to the semantic analysis of legal texts. Semantic analysis is the process of relating syntactic elements and structures, drawn from the levels of phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, and whole documents, to their language-independent meanings in a given domain, including meanings specific to legal information. The range of focal texts includes:
statutes, regulations, and court-made pronouncements of legal rules embodying legal norms,
textual arguments in legal case opinions interpreting legal norms and applying them in concrete fact situations,
legislative and policy-based debates concerning proposed legal norms, their purpose and meaning,
actual and proposed contracts that need to be analyzed for the permissions and obligations they encode and their consistency with organizational preferences or legal frameworks.
Researchers have long been developing tools to aggregate, synthesize, structure, summarize, and reason about legal norms and arguments in texts. Recently, however, dramatic advances in natural language processing, text and argument mining, information extraction, and automated question answering are changing how automatic semantic analysis of legal rules and arguments will be performed in the future. The discussion will include, but will not be limited to, retrieving documents with varying concepts of relevance, extracting legal norms from retrieved documents, and extracting various sorts of arguments. A priority will be given to topics that discuss both natural language texts and methods of representation or analysis.
Application of NLP to analyze arguments in legal texts: identification, annotation, and extraction of argument elements; relating arguments; and classifying arguments
Automated or semi-automated approaches to extracting legal norms from legal texts
Creation/evaluation of high quality annotated natural language legal corpora
Automated semantic analysis of legal texts
Development of computer-supported annotation environments for automated semantic analysis of legal texts
Applications of machine learning to train automatic systems on tasks related to semantic analysis of legal texts, identifying legal norms, or extracting legal argumentation
Summarization, visualization, and information retrieval for legal texts
Argument mining of court cases, legislative records, legal policy debates and other legal documents
Automated translations of legal text to formal or abstract representations that can be used for reasoning
Applications of computational models of legal argumentation to guide interpretation of legal texts
Application of linguistic theories of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse to legal texts
Adaptation of NLP tools to the particularities of legal texts
Implications of the above developments for law students and legal education
We invite papers on and demonstrations of original work on these and other aspects of automated detection, extraction and analysis of semantic information in legal texts. Two types of papers are solicited:
full research papers (10 pages in the approved style) and
short position papers (5 pages in the approved style).
A Program Committee will review both types of papers using the conference review system. Submissions will be evaluated on appropriateness for this call, originality of the research described and technical quality. Authors of selected papers will be invited to present the papers at the Workshop: 30-minute presentations (including 10 minutes of questions) for full research papers and 15-minute presentations for position papers (including 5 minutes of questions)
The morning session will be a series of full-paper presentations. The afternoon will begin with an invited speaker, continue with both full- and position-paper presentations, and conclude with a moderated general discussion.
Authors should submit their papers use the same ACM paper templates used for ICAIL to the ASAIL 2019 Easychair. While papers can be prepared using LaTeX or Word, all papers should be converted to PDF prior to submission.
Submissions due: Sunday, April 28, 2019 [Extended]
Authors are strongly encouraged to submit an early abstract of their submission by April 14, 2019.
Accept/Reject notification: May 15, 2019
Camera-Ready Papers due: May 29, 2019
Kevin D. Ashley, University of Pittsburgh
Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool
Karl Branting, MITRE Corporation
Enrico Francesconi, Italian National Research Council (ITTIG-CNR), Publications Office of the EU
Matthias Grabmair, Carnegie Mellon University
Vern R. Walker, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University
Bernhard Waltl, BMW Group AG
Adam Wyner, Swansea University
Elliott Ash, ETH Zurich
Floris Bex, Utrecht University
Chris Giannella, MITRE Corporation
Mi-Young Kim, University of Alberta
Jörg Landthaler, Technical University of Munich
Jaromir Savelka, University of Pittsburgh
Tran Thi Oanh, Vietnam National University
Giulia Venturi, ItaliaNLP Lab
Hannes Westermann, University of Montreal
Radboud Winkels, University of Amsterdam