Populating legal ontologies using semantic role labeling

in Artificial Intelligence and Law (2021), 29(2), 171-211

This article seeks to address the problem of the ‘resource consumption bottleneck’ of creating legal semantic technologies manually. It describes a semantic role labeling based information extraction ... [more ▼]

This article seeks to address the problem of the ‘resource consumption bottleneck’ of creating legal semantic technologies manually. It describes a semantic role labeling based information extraction system to extract definitions and norms from legislation and represent them as structured norms in legal ontologies. The output is intended to help make laws more accessible, understandable, and searchable in a legal document management system. [less ▲]

From Georeferenced Data to Socio-Spatial Knowledge. Ontology Design Patterns to Discover Domain-Specific Knowledge from Crowdsourced Data

in 21st International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (2018)

So far, ontologies developed to support Geographic Information science have been mostly designed from a space-centered rather than a human-centered and social perspective. In the last decades, a wealth of ... [more ▼]

So far, ontologies developed to support Geographic Information science have been mostly designed from a space-centered rather than a human-centered and social perspective. In the last decades, a wealth of georeferenced data is collected through sensors, mobile and web platforms from the crowd, providing rich information about people’s collective experiences and behaviors in cities. As a consequence, these new data sources require models able to make machine-understandable the social meanings and uses people commonly associate with certain places. This contribution proposes a set of reusable Ontology Design Patterns (ODP) to guide a data mining workflow and to semantically enrich the mined results. The ODPs explicitly aim at representing two facets of the geographic knowledge - the built environment and people social behavior in cities - as well as the way they interact. Modelling the interplay between the physical and the human aspects of the urban environment provides an ontology representation of the socio-spatial knowledge which can be used as baseline domain knowledge for analysing and interpreting georeferenced data collected through crowdsourcing. An experimentation using a TripAdvisor data sample to recognize food consumption practices in the city of Turin is presented. [less ▲]

Concept Recognition in European and National Law

in proc. of The 30th international conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2017) (2017)

AGM Contraction and Revision of Rules

in Journal of Logic, Language and Information (2016), 25(3), 273-297

In this paper we study AGM contraction and revision of rules using input/output logical theories. We replace propositional formulas in the AGM framework of theory change by pairs of propositional formulas ... [more ▼]

In this paper we study AGM contraction and revision of rules using input/output logical theories. We replace propositional formulas in the AGM framework of theory change by pairs of propositional formulas, representing the rule based character of theories, and we replace the classical consequence operator Cn by an input/output logic. The results in this paper suggest that, in general, results from belief base dynamics can be transferred to rule base dynamics, but that a similar transfer of AGM theory change to rule change is much more problematic. First, we generalise belief base contraction to rule base contraction, and show that two representation results of Hansson still hold for rule base contraction. Second, we show that the six so-called basic postulates of AGM contraction are consistent only for some input/output logics, but not for others. In particular, we show that the notorious recovery postulate can be satisfied only by basic output, but not by simple-minded output. Third, we show how AGM rule revision can be defined in terms of AGM rule contraction using the Levi identity. We highlight various topics for further research. [less ▲]

Argumentation-Based Legal Requirements Engineering: The Role of Legal Interpretation in Requirements Acquisition

in Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops (REW), IEEE International (2016)

Textual Inference with Deep Learning Technique

in Proceedings of the 28th Annual Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC2016). (2016)

Mapping Recitals to Normative Provisions in EU Legislation to Assist Legal Interpretation

in Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (2015)

Integrating Legal-URN and Eunomos: towards a comprehensive compliance management solution

in Proceedings of AI Approaches to the Complexity of Legal Systems (AICOL 2013) (2014)

The gap between legal and technical domains in norm representation

in New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2014)

On the Input/Output behavior of argumentation frameworks

in Artificial Intelligence and Law (2014)

This paper tackles the fundamental questions arising when looking at argumentation frameworks as interacting components, characterized by an Input/Output behavior, rather than as isolated monolithical ... [more ▼]

This paper tackles the fundamental questions arising when looking at argumentation frameworks as interacting components, characterized by an Input/Output behavior, rather than as isolated monolithical entities. This modeling stance arises naturally in some application contexts, like multi-agent systems, but, more importantly, has a crucial impact on several general application-independent issues, like argumentation dynamics, argument summarization and explanation, incremental computation, and inter-formalism translation. Pursuing this research direction, the paper introduces a general modeling approach and provides a comprehensive set of theoretical results putting the intuitive notion of Input/Output behavior of argumentation frameworks on a solid formal ground. This is achieved by combining three main ingredients. First, several novel notions are introduced at the representation level, notably those of argumentation framework with input, of argumentation multipole, and of replacement of multipoles within a traditional argumentation framework. Second, several relevant features of argumentation semantics are identified and formally characterized. In particular, the canonical local function provides an input-aware semantics characterization and a suite of decomposability properties are introduced, concerning the correspondences between semantics outcomes at global and local level. The third ingredient glues the former ones, as it consists of the investigation of some semantics-dependent properties of the newly introduced entities, namely S-equivalence of multipoles, S-legitimacy and S-safeness of replacements, and transparency of a semantics with respect to replacements. Altogether they provide the basis and draw the limits of sound interchangeability of multipoles within traditional frameworks. The paper develops an extensive analysis of all the concepts listed above, covering seven well-known literature semantics and taking into account various, more or less constrained, ways of partitioning an argumentation framework. Diverse examples, taken from the literature, are used to illustrate the application of the results obtained and, finally, an extensive discussion of the related literature is provided. [less ▲]