IfCoLog JLA - Reasoning on Legal Texts

[geoff at cs.miami.edu]

IfCoLog Journal of Logics and their Applications

Special issue "Reasoning on Legal Texts"

** Paper submission deadline: Jul 31st, 2018 **

Guest editors:
Livio Robaldo - University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
Sotiris Batsakis - University of Huddersfield (UK)
Maria Vanina Martinez - Universidad Nacional del Sur (Argentina)
Christoph Benzmueller - Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany)

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Regulations are a widespread and important part of governments and businesses. 
They encode how products are manufactured, and how the processes are to be 
performed. Such regulations, in general, are difficult to understand and apply. 
Undoubtedly, the law, for example, as the reflection of human society, presents 
the broadest range of expression and interpretation, since the interpretation 
of even the most common words becomes problematic. Even individual regulations 
may be self-contradictory as a result of their gradual development process, as 
well as the lack of a formal drafting process.

In an increasingly complicated environment, as well as regulatory review,
automated reasoning processes become more and more necessary. Current
state-of-the-art technologies enforce reasoning applications on legal texts
such as decision making and compliance checking starting from logical and/or 
ontology-based representations of norms. These semantic representations are 
typically obtained via Natural Language Processing (NLP) in an automatic 
fashion, in order to avoid huge time-consuming manual effort.

To bridge such challenges, several research projects in the legal domain have 
been recently funded by the EU and similar institutions, among which is 
"MIREL: MIning and REasoning with Legal texts". The aim of the MIREL project 
is to bridge the gap between the community working on legal ontologies and NLP 
methods applied to legal documents, and the community working on reasoning 
methods and formal logic, towards the objectives described above.

This special issue focuses on legal reasoning, thus welcoming submissions
describing novel approaches for reasoning in the legal domain starting from
logical or ontology-based representations of legal knowledge.

A non-exhaustive list of topics includes:

- Logical formalization of legal knowledge
- Norm enforcement and compliance
- Decision making methods and applications
- Computational methods for legal reasoning
- Legal argumentation
- Dynamics of normative knowledge
- Formal models of norms, normative systems, and norm-governed societies
- Using logic formalisms and technologies in large legal document
collections
- Legislative and case-law metadata models
- Semantic annotations for legal texts
- Inconsistency handling and exception-tolerant reasoning
- Legal reasoning under uncertainty and incomplete information
- Legal reasoning with vague notions
- Defeasible normative systems
- Implementations and applications in the legal domain
- Large-scale normative reasoning


*Important Dates*
- Paper submission: Jul 31st, 2018
- Notification to authors: November 30th, 2018
- Camera-ready: January 1st, 2019

*Submission Instructions*
Papers submitted to the special issue must be sent to Jane Spurr 
(jane.spurr at kcl.ac.uk). Please specify this special issue in the email subject.
We expect papers of about 15-30 pages; however, justified exceptions are
possible. Each submission will be assigned with two reviewers.

If have any enquiries/comments, please contact Livio Robaldo at:
livio.robaldo at uni.lu