- Call for Papers (extended) -

Paper submission deadline: 23:59, 26th April 3rd May, 2023 (AoE)

The Sixth Workshop on Automated Detection, Extraction and Analysis of Semantic Information in Legal Texts (ASAIL) will be held online in conjunction with the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2023). It is a continuation of the successful prior ASAIL workshops at ICAIL and JURIX.

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 the application of natural language processing, including the use of computational models 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 decisions 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 organisational preferences or legal frameworks;

• technical reports and other evidentiary documents;

• court testimony and narrative texts in submissions by self-represented parties.

Researchers have long been developing tools to aggregate, synthesise, structure, summarise, and reason about legal norms and arguments in texts. Current 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. In particular, the recent breakthrough in natural language processing brought about by neural network models, including transfer learning using complex language models, has created immense new potential for leveraging legal text for technology supporting legal practice, research, argumentation, and decision making. At the same time, increasing awareness of the mandate of ethical use of AI is fuelling a debate about the requirements of such systems and motivates important exploratory work on explainable and justifiable AI that is particularly crucial for the legal domain. The ASAIL workshop provides a forum for the proliferation of exciting ideas that advance the field of semantic analysis of legal texts.

Covered Topics

• Application of NLP to analyse 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

Inclusiveness

The ASAIL workshops strive for inclusiveness and the organising committee encourages submissions of work concerning all legal systems, traditions, and languages.

Papers Solicited

We invite papers written in English on, and demonstrations of, original work on the above listed and other aspects of automated detection, extraction and analysis of semantic information in legal texts. Three types of papers are solicited:

• full research papers (10 pages in the approved style plus bibliography); 

• short papers (6 pages in the approved style plus bibliography); and

• position papers (2 pages in the approved style plus bibliography).

The main aim of the workshop is to elicit thoughtful discussion of novel ideas, to that end we particularly encourage submission of relevant short and position papers to the workshop. Position papers will be expected to outline novel research that is in its early stages without substantive results, whereas full and short papers will express a tangible contribution and will be evaluated accordingly.

Paper Contribution Evaluation

To maintain ASAIL’s relevance in the larger, rapidly moving field of legal text analytics, paper submissions must explicitly identify their substantial (for full and short papers) or potential (for position papers) contribution to the state of the art and provide a satisfying amount of discussion apposite for the length of the paper. Possible forms of contribution include:

• Application of novel NLP techniques to a known corpus;

• Application of known NLP techniques to a novel corpus; and

• Detailed survey and analysis of a novel corpus that will be shared with the community and/or exhibits phenomena of broader interest.

For full and short papers only: In explaining a paper’s contribution, the authors should present, as well as discuss, their data, results and model behaviour in sufficient depth, and go beyond reporting common metrics. Program committee members will be instructed to review submissions according to this standard.

For position papers: The authors should present and discuss interesting ideas and approaches related to the topics described above, with or without preliminary results. Position papers will be selected based on their capacity to encourage fruitful discussion and exchange of ideas between the authors and workshop participants. 

Single-blind Review

ASAIL uses a single-blind peer-review process; authors are not required to anonymise any aspect of their submission, but reviewers will be kept anonymous to the authors. We adopt this process as an expedient balance between any concerns of bias and facilitating submission.

Format & Submission

While the bibliography is extraneous to the page limit, papers should be self-contained as ASAIL proceedings do not include appendices. A Program Committee will review all types of papers using the conference review system. Submissions will be evaluated on appropriateness for this call, originality of the research described, technical quality, and capability to encourage discussion. Authors of selected papers will be invited to present the papers at the Workshop, with at least one author per accepted paper expected to register and attend in person.

Any paper under review for alternative proceedings should NOT be submitted for peer-review at ASAIL. However, a 2-page position paper summarising the research could be submitted for publication in ASAIL proceedings and presentation at the workshop.

Our expectation is that accepted papers will be published as part of the workshop proceedings at CEUR-WS, as in prior ASAIL workshops. Hence, all papers must follow the two-column CEUR-WS Layout [Latex, Word]. Papers not conforming to the style or exceeding the length limitation will be rejected without review. Papers must be submitted via the ASAIL 2023 Easychair system by the due date.

Workshop Format

Both the morning and afternoon sessions will be held in person at the venue and include full, short, and position paper presentations with subsequent Q&A. In order to maximise inclusiveness, the organising committee will determine the workshop schedule after all submissions have been received. We also expect to host a moderated panel session to encourage thoughtful debate and exchange of ideas. 

Important Dates

Submissions due: 23:59, 26th April 3rd May, 2023 (AoE)

Authors are strongly encouraged to submit an early abstract of their submission.

Accept/Reject notification: 26th May, 2023

Camera-Ready Papers due: 5th June, 2023

Venue

The workshop will be held for a full-day on Friday 23rd June in conjunction with ICAIL 2023, at the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal.

Organising Committee

• Francesca Lagioia, European University Institute and University of Bologna

• Jack Mumford, University of Liverpool (chair)

• Daphne Odekerken, Utrecht University

• Hannes Westermann, University of Montreal

Advisory Board

• Kevin D. Ashley, University of Pittsburgh

• Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool

• Karl Branting, MITRE Corporation

• Enrico Francesconi, Italian National Research Council (IGSG-CNR) and European Parliament

• Matthias Grabmair, Technical University of Munich

• Jaromír Šavelka, Carnegie Mellon University

• Vern R. Walker, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University

• Bernhard Waltl, BMW Group AG

• Adam Wyner, Swansea University

Programme Committee

• Tommaso Agnoloni, Italian National Research Council (ITTIG-CNR)

• Elliott Ash, ETH Zurich

• Aurore Clément Troussel, Université de Montréal - HEC Paris

• Giovanni Comande, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna

• Andrea Galassi, University of Bologna

• Morgan Gray, University of Pittsburgh

• Nicolas Hernandez, Nantes Université

• Elize Herrewijnen, Utrecht University

• Sieh-Chuen Huang, National Taiwan University

• Mi-Young Kim, University of Alberta

• Daniele Licari, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna

• Ruta Liepina, University of Bologna

• Marco Lippi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

• Marcin Namysl, Fraunhofer-Institut für Intelligente Analyse- und Informationssysteme IAIS

• Henrik Palmer Olsen, University of Copenhagen

• Monica Palmirani, University of Bologna

• Georg Rehm, DFKI

• David Restrepo Amariles, HEC Paris

• Marijn Schraagen, Utrecht University

• Sebastian Schwemer, University of Copenhagen

• Emilio Sulis, University of Turin

• Francesca Toni, Imperial College London

• Giulia Venturi, Italian National Research Council (ILC-CNR)

• Raboud Winkels, University of Amsterdam

• Huihui Xu, University of Pittsburgh