Appel: 1st CfP Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012), LREC 2012 Workshop

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:03:42 +0100
From: ELRA ELDA Information <info at elda.org>
Message-ID: <4EEF605E.1020005 at elda.org>


[Apologies for multiple postings]

LREC 2012 Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012)
CALL FOR PAPERS
27 May 2012, Istanbul

*Workshop description*

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.

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 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 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.

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.  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.

*Areas of Interest*

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.

Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:

- Construction, extension, merging, customization of legal language
  resources: terminologies, ontologies
- Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts
- Semantic annotation of legal textual corpora
- Legal text processing
- Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing
- Legal thesauri mapping
- Automatic Classification of legal documents
- Logical analysis of legal language
- Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a
  logical formalism
- Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments
- Dialogue protocols for argumentation
- Legal argument ontology
- Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural 
  language
- Controlled language systems for law.

*Submissions*

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.
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 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 https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/SPLeT2012/.
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 http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012.

Selected contributions to a Special Issue of AI&Law Journal
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).

*Important Dates*
Paper submission deadline: 10 February 2012
Acceptance notification sent: 5 March 2012
Final version deadline: 23 March 2012
Workshop date: 27 May 2012

*Workshop Chairs*
- Enrico Francesconi (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell'Informazione
  Giuridica of CNR, Florence, Italy)
- Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of CNR,
  Pisa, Italy)
- Wim Peters (Natural Language Processing Research Group, University of
  Sheffield, UK)
- Adam Wyner (Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool,
  UK) Address any queries regarding the workshop to:
  lrec_legalWS at ilc.cnr.it

*Program Committee (tbc)*
Kevin Ashley (Univ of Pittsburgh)
Johan Bos (University of Rome, Italy)
Danièle Bourcier (Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany)
Thomas R. Bruce (Cornell Law School, Ithaca, NY, USA)
Pompeu Casanovas (Institut de Dret i Tecnologia, UAB, Barcelona, Spain)
Jack Conrad (Thomson-Reuters)
Matthias Grabmair (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Carole Hafner (Northeaster Univ.)
Antonio Lazari (Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Pisa, Italy)
Leonardo Lesmo (Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, 
Torino, Italy)
Carl Malamud (Public.Resource.Org)
Marie-Francine Moens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
Thorne McCarty (Reutgers Univ.)
Raquel Mochales Palau (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)
Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de Évora, Portugal)
Robert Richards (Legal Informatics blog)
Tony Russell-Rose (Endeca)
Erich Schweighofer (Universität Wien, Rechtswissenschaftliche Fakultät, 
Wien, Austria)
Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie Univ)
Manfred Stede (University of Potsdam, Germany)
Daniela Tiscornia (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell'Informazione 
Giuridica of CNR, Florence, Italy)
Tom van Engers (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, 
Netherlands)
Giulia Venturi (Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Pisa, Italy)
Vern R. Walker (Hofstra University School of Law, Hofstra University, USA)
Radboud Winkels (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, 
Netherlands)

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