ABSTRACT. The main underlying assumption of traditional legal knowledge representation and reasoning is that knowledge and data are both available in main memory. However, in the era of big data, where large amounts of data are generated daily, an increasing range of scientific disciplines, as well as business and human activities, are becoming data-driven. This paper discusses new opportunities and potential applications of legal reasoning involving big data as well as the technical challenges associated with the main concepts of the big data landscape, namely volume, velocity, variety and veracity. Future research directions based on the identified challenges are also proposed.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we present a method of automatic catchphrase extracting from legal case documents. We utilize deep neural networks for constructing scoring model of our extraction system. We achieve comparable performance with systems using corpus-wide and citation information which we do not use in our system.

ABSTRACT. Although the representation of normative texts and simulation of legal acts are commonly interdisciplinary themes in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Law (AI & Law), some questions remain open or are scarcely explored. As for these incipient fields, we can mention the formalization of the legal body in the face of explicit or implicit exceptions in the juridical reasoning that occurs daily, and the treatment of readability issues, in exposing or justifying decisionmaking. In this paper, we present the prototype LEGIS and discuss a proposal to simulate legal action on two fronts. We adopt a non-monotonic semantics for knowledge representation that is appropriate to the singularities of the legal realm, the Preferential Semantics, and propose a transformation to a formal logic argumentation style, the Sequent Calculus, in order to raise the inference proofs to a level of legibility not yet conveniently attained by conventional reasoners.

ABSTRACT. We present Nomothesia, a linked data platform that makes Greek legislation easily accessible to the public, law professionals and application developers. Nomothesia offers advanced services for retrieving and querying Greek legislation and is intended for citizens and law professionals through intuitive presentational views and search interfaces, but also for application developers that would like to consume content through two web services: a SPARQL endpoint and a RESTful API. Opening up legislation in this way is a great leap towards making governments accountable to citizens and increasing transparency.

ABSTRACT. We describe the theoretical principles that underlie the design of a software tool which could be used by judges for writing judgements and for making decisions about litigations. The tool is based on Binary Decision Diagrams (BDD), which are graphical representations of truth–valued functions associated to propositional formulas. Given a specific litigation, the tool asks questions to the judge; each question is represented by a propositional atom. Their answers, true or false, allow to evaluate the truth value of the formula which encodes the overall recommendation of the software about the litigation. Our approach combines some sort of ‘theoretical’ or ‘legal’ reasoning dealing with the core of the litigation itself together with some sort of ‘procedural’ reasoning dealing with the protocol that has to be followed by the judge during the trial: some questions or group of questions must necessarily be examined and sometimes in a specific order. That is why we consider extensions of BDD called Multi-BDD. They are BDD with multiple entries corresponding to the different specific issues that must necessarily be addressed by the judge during the trial. We illustrate our ideas on a case study dealing with French union trade elections, an example that has been used throughout a project with the French Cour de cassation.

ABSTRACT. The right to silence is considered in various legal systems. However, this phenomenon has not been studied enough from a logical perspective. After reviewing some previous studies of silence and conversational implicature of Grice, we formulate two different interpretations of silence (Defensive and Acquiescent Silence), in terms of the Says() predicate. Then, we explore the consequences of such interpretations in a case study involving testimonies, by expressing them in logic programming. Several conclusions are derived from the different possibilities that opened for analysis.

ABSTRACT. We devise a shallow semantical embedding of \AA{}qvist's dyadic deontic logic {\bf E} in classical higher-order logic. This embedding is encoded in Isabelle/HOL, which turns this system into a proof assistant for deontic logic reasoning. The experiments with this environment provide evidence that this logic \textit{implementation} fruitfully enables interactive and automated reasoning at the meta-level and the object-level.

ABSTRACT. A shallow semantical embedding of Input/Output logic in classical higher-order logic is presented, and shown to be faithful (sound an complete). This embedding has been implemented in the higher-order proof assistant Isabelle/HOL. We provide an empirical regulative framework for assessing General Data Protection Regulation.

ABSTRACT. Privacy policies are known to be impenetrable and lengthy texts that are hardly read and poorly understood. Research streams towards machine-interpretability of privacy terms are emerging, while the human-readable implementation is often overlooked. DaPIS is a machine-readable Data Protection Icon Set that was designed following human-centred methods drawn from the emerging discipline of legal design. Icons can serve as information markers and support the navigation of privacy policies. DaPIS is modelled on PrOnto, an ontology of the GDPR, and is machine-readable and automatically retrievable, thus offering a comprehensive solution for the Semantic Web. In this way, the lawyer-readable, the machine-readable, and the human-readable representations of legal information can be interlinked to enhance its comprehensibility.

ABSTRACT. The century-old theory of legal rights presented by Wesley N. Hohfeld is highly influential not just in analytic legal theory but also as serving basis of normative multi-agent systems, specifications of aspects in computer systems, and formal theory of organisation. Still, it is often criticized as having limitations on what legal situations can be modelled in it: while it seems an admittedly proper picturing of how a contract works, it is often thought to be unable to grasp rights considered in criminal law like the right to life or physical integrity. I show in this talk how we need to modify the classical formalizations' language and the classical approaches' definition in order to get a formal setup in which these limitations can be refuted.