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[Apologies for multiple postings]<br>
<br>
LREC 2012 Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts
(SPLeT-2012)<br>
CALL FOR PAPERS<br>
27 May 2012, Istanbul<br>
<br>
<b>Workshop description</b><br>
The legal domain represents a primary candidate for web-based
information distribution, exchange and management, as testified by
the numerous e-government, e-justice and e-democracy initiatives
worldwide. The last few years have seen a growing body of research
and practice in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Law which
addresses a range of topics: automated legal reasoning and
argumentation, semantic and cross-language legal information
retrieval, document classification, legal drafting, legal knowledge
discovery and extraction, as well as the construction of legal
ontologies and their application to the law domain. In this context,
it is of paramount importance to use Natural Language Processing
techniques and tools that automate and facilitate the process of
knowledge extraction from legal texts.<br>
Since 2008, the SPLeT workshops have been a venue where researchers
from the Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence and
Law communities meet, exchange information, compare perspectives,
and share experiences and concerns on the topic of legal knowledge
extraction and management, with particular emphasis on the semantic
processing of legal texts. Within the Artificial Intelligence and
Law community, there have also been a number of dedicated workshops
and tutorials specifically focussing on different aspects of
semantic processing of legal texts at conferences such as
JURIX-2008, ICAIL-2009, ICAIL-2011, as well as in the International
Summer School “Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web” (2007,
2008, 2009, 2010, 2011). To continue this momentum and to advance
research, a 4th Workshop on “Semantic Processing of Legal Texts” is
being organized at the LREC-2012 conference to bring to the
attention of the broader LR/HLT (Language Resources/Human Language
Technology) community the specific technical challenges posed by the
semantic processing of legal texts and also share with the<br>
community the motivations and objectives which make it of interest
to researchers in legal informatics. The outcome of these
interactions are expected to advance research and applications<br>
and foster interdisciplinary collaboration within the legal domain.
New to this edition of the workshop are two sub-events to provide
common and consistent task definitions, datasets, and evaluation for
legal-IE systems along with a forum for the presentation of varying
but focused efforts on their development. The first sub-event will
be a shared task specifically focusing on dependency parsing of
legal texts: although this is not a domain-specific task, it is a
task which creates the prerequisites for advanced IE applications
operating on legal texts, which can benefit from reliable
preprocessing tools. For this year our aim is to create the
prerequisites for more advanced domain-specific tasks (e.g. event
extraction) to be organized in future SPLeT editions. We strongly
believe that this could be a way to attract the attention of the
LR/HLT community to the specific challenges posed by the analysis of
this type of texts and to have a clearer idea of the current state
of the art. The languages dealt with will be Italian and English. A
specific Call for Participation for the shared task is available in
a dedicated page.<br>
The second sub-event will be an online, manual, collaborative,
semantic annotation exercise, the results of which will be presented
and discussed at the workshop. The goals of the exercise are: (1)
to gain insight on and work towards the creation of a gold standard
corpus of legal documents in a cohesive domain; and (2) to test the
feasibility of the exercise and to get feedback on its annotation
structure and workflow. The corpus to be annotated will be a
selection of documents drawn from EU and US legislation, regulation,
and case law in a particular domain (e.g. consumer or environmental
protection). For this exercise, the language will be English. A
specific Call for Participation for this annotation exercise is
available in a dedicated page.<br>
The main goals of the workshop and associated events are to provide
an overview of the state-ofthe-art in legal knowledge extraction and
management, to explore new research and development directions and
emerging trends, and to exchange information regarding legal
language resources and human language technologies and their
applications.<br>
<br>
<b>Areas of Interest</b><br>
The workshop will focus on the topics of the automatic extraction of
information from legal texts and the structural organisation of the
extracted knowledge. Particular emphasis will be given to the
crucial role of language resources and human language technologies.<br>
Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:<br>
- Construction, extension, merging, customization of legal language
resources: terminologies, ontologies<br>
- Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts<br>
- Semantic annotation of legal textual corpora<br>
- Legal text processing<br>
- Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing<br>
- Legal thesauri mapping<br>
- Automatic Classification of legal documents<br>
- Logical analysis of legal language<br>
- Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments
into a logical formalism<br>
- Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments<br>
- Dialogue protocols for argumentation<br>
- Legal argument ontology<br>
- Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to
natural language<br>
- Controlled language systems for law.<br>
<br>
<b>Submissions</b><br>
Submissions are solicited from researchers working on all aspects of
semantic processing of legal texts. Authors are invited to submit
papers describing original completed work, work in progress,
interesting problems, case studies or research trends related to one
or more of the topics of interest listed above. The final version of
the accepted papers will be published in the Workshop Proceedings.
Short or full papers can be submitted. Short papers are expected to
present new ideas or new visions that may influence the direction of
future research, yet they may be less mature than full papers. While
an exhaustive evaluation of the proposed ideas is not necessary,
insight and in-depth understanding of the issues is expected. Full
papers should be more well developed and evaluated. Short papers
will be reviewed the same way as full papers by the Program
Committee and will be published in the Workshop Proceedings.<br>
Full paper submissions should not exceed 10 pages, short papers 6
pages; both should be typeset using a font size of 11 points. Style
files will be made available by LREC for the camera-ready<br>
versions of accepted papers. Papers should be submitted
electronically, no later than February 10, 2012. The only accepted
format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF. Submission will be
electronic using START paper submission software available at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/SPLeT2012/">https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/SPLeT2012/</a>.<br>
Note that when submitting a paper through the START page, authors
will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a
broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits,
etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are
a new result of your research. For further information on this new
initiative, please refer to
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012">http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012</a>.<br>
<br>
Selected contributions to a Special Issue of AI&Law Journal<br>
After the Workshop a number of selected, revised, peer-reviewed
articles will be published in a Special Issue on Semantic Processing
of Legal Texts of the AI and Law Journal (Springer).<br>
<br>
<b>Important Dates</b><br>
Paper submission deadline: 10 February 2012<br>
Acceptance notification sent: 5 March 2012<br>
Final version deadline: 23 March 2012<br>
Workshop date: 27 May 2012<br>
<br>
<b>Workshop Chairs</b><br>
- Enrico Francesconi (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche
dell’Informazione Giuridica of CNR, Florence, Italy)<br>
- Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of
CNR, Pisa, Italy)<br>
- Wim Peters (Natural Language Processing Research Group, University
of Sheffield, UK)<br>
- Adam Wyner (Department of Computer Science, University of
Liverpool, UK)<br>
Address any queries regarding the workshop to:
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:lrec_legalWS@ilc.cnr.it">lrec_legalWS@ilc.cnr.it</a><br>
<br>
<b>Program Committee (tbc)</b><br>
Kevin Ashley (Univ of Pittsburgh)<br>
Johan Bos (University of Rome, Italy)<br>
Danièle Bourcier (Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany)<br>
Thomas R. Bruce (Cornell Law School, Ithaca, NY, USA)<br>
Pompeu Casanovas (Institut de Dret i Tecnologia, UAB, Barcelona,
Spain)<br>
Jack Conrad (Thomson-Reuters)<br>
Matthias Grabmair (University of Pittsburgh, USA)<br>
Carole Hafner (Northeaster Univ.)<br>
Antonio Lazari (Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Pisa, Italy)<br>
Leonardo Lesmo (Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino,
Torino, Italy)<br>
Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org)<br>
Marie-Francine Moens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)<br>
Thorne McCarty (Reutgers Univ.)<br>
Raquel Mochales Palau (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)<br>
Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de Évora, Portugal)<br>
Robert Richards (Legal Informatics blog)<br>
Tony Russell-Rose (Endeca)<br>
Erich Schweighofer (Universität Wien, Rechtswissenschaftliche
Fakultät, Wien, Austria)<br>
Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie Univ)<br>
Manfred Stede (University of Potsdam, Germany)<br>
Daniela Tiscornia (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione
Giuridica of CNR, Florence, Italy)<br>
Tom van Engers (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam,
Netherlands)<br>
Giulia Venturi (Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Pisa, Italy)<br>
Vern R. Walker (Hofstra University School of Law, Hofstra
University, USA)<br>
Radboud Winkels (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam,
Netherlands)<br>
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