LIRAI
The First Workshop on
Legal Information Retrieval meets Artificial Intelligence
Held in conjunction with the
ACM Hypertext 2023 conference
in Rome, Italy
4 September 2023
Proceedings
The proceedings of the first edition of LIRAI can be found on CEUR-WS.org.
The organizers express their gratitude to CEUR-WS.org for sponsoring this workshop through their work and enabling LIRAI to make the proceedings open access.
About the Workshop
The Legal Information Retrieval meets Artificial Intelligence (LIRAI) workshop series aims to provide a venue hosting discussion of novel ideas, evaluations, and success stories concerning the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Information Retrieval (IR) to the legal domain.
All around the world, lawmakers, legal professionals, and citizens must cope with the sheer amount of legal knowledge present in legal documents. These documents can be norms, regulations, directives, legal cases, and other relevant material for legal practitioners, such as legal commentary. The continuous evolution of legal documents is a challenging setting, with implicit relationships playing an important role beyond explicit references. Recently, the adoption of shared machine-readable formats and FAIR principles, as well as methods and practices from the Semantic Web, have certainly improved the accessibility of legal knowledge and its interoperability. Still, retrieving legal knowledge and making sense of it are not solved problems. The legal community often has special requirements for retrieval systems (e.g., high recall, explainability). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is positioned as a lever to enhance our ability to find, understand, and correlate legal information, and to comprehend its relationship to reality, in terms of compliance evaluation and risk/benefit analysis.
We call contributions on these topics in the form of papers, which will be collected in an open-access proceedings published on
CEUR-WS.org and thus indexed by Scopus, DBLP, Google Scholar, and other citation databases.
Relevance for the Hypertext Community
In most legal traditions, legal knowledge evolved as an intricate hypertext spread across a large body of diverse documents woven together by explicit references. Since countries are digitizing their legal systems with the adoption of machine-readable formats for the interchange of legal information, their body of legal knowledge is provided as hypertexts. Furthermore, the adoption of Web technologies, in particular those of the Semantic Web, means that legal knowledge is not only available on the web, but it is also part of the web, which is perhaps the most successful example of hypertext to date.
As a hypertext, a legal document base has its own characteristics that distinguish it from other hypertexts and make it a special case study of interest in its own right. These include the practice of amending previous documents in subsequent ones, and the challenging nature of implicit relationships between documents, which are not fully covered by explicit hyperlinks.