MUtation, 2003

Yearbook for the University of Missouri--Columbia School of Medicine

A Survey on Legal Question Answering Systems

Many legal professionals think that the explosion of information about local, regional, national, and international legislation makes their practice more costly, time-consuming, and even error-prone. The two main reasons for this are that most legislation is usually unstructured, and the tremendous amount and pace with which laws are released causes information overload in their daily tasks. In the case of the legal domain, the research community agrees that a system allowing to generate automatic responses to legal questions could substantially impact many practical implications in daily activities. The degree of usefulness is such that even a semi-automatic solution could significantly help to reduce the workload to be faced. This is mainly because a Question Answering system could be able to automatically process a massive amount of legal resources to answer a question or doubt in seconds, which means that it could save resources in the form of effort, money, and time to many professionals in the legal sector. In this work, we quantitatively and qualitatively survey the solutions that currently exist to meet this challenge.Comment: 57 pages, 1 figure, 10 table

Constraint rule-based programming of norms for electronic institutions

Peer reviewedPostprin

Prediction of Relevant Biomedical Documents: a Human Microbiome Case Study

Background: Retrieving relevant biomedical literature has become increasingly difficult due to the large volume and rapid growth of biomedical publication. A query to a biomedical retrieval system often retrieves hundreds of results. Since the searcher will not likely consider all of these documents, ranking the documents is important. Ranking by recency, as PubMed does, takes into account only one factor indicating potential relevance. This study explores the use of the searcher’s relevance feedback judgments to support relevance ranking based on features more general than recency. Results: It was found that the researcher’s relevance judgments could be used to accurately predict the relevance of additional documents: both using tenfold cross-validation and by training on publications from 2008–2010 and testing on documents from 2011. Conclusions: This case study has shown the promise for relevance feedback to improve biomedical document retrieval. A researcher’s judgments as to which initially retrieved documents are relevant, or not, can be leveraged to predict additional relevant documents

The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies on legal practitioners in law firms and legal publishers.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions currently have the capabilities to perform tasks quicker, more accurately and consistently than legal professionals. This could result in inducing the opinion in employers at private law firms and legal publishers that AI software may have a quicker return on investment and a lower total cost of ownership. The purpose of this study is to discover whether the availability of yield-producing, affordable AI technologies in the legal industry could lead to legal practitioners and their roles becoming redundant. An explanatory quantitative study was established using a cross-sectional descriptive survey design to achieve the objectives of the research. A self-administered structured questionnaire was developed and delivered via hardcopy and e-mail to 102 legal professionals by means of snowball sampling. These respondents were drawn from 19 different private law firms, legal publishers and legal departments at private corporations. Statistical analysis performed on the data collected was analysed and interpreted using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results revealed that there was a general awareness of advancement in certain legal AI solutions and there was a general agreement that legal professionals would advocate that their companies invest in AI Solutions if it produced additional accurate work yield while being cost-effective. The final revelation was that legal professionals agreed that AI solutions were not yet mature enough to replace human legal professionals. Regardless of this sentiment, they felt that they and their companies, would hire fewer legal professionals presented with the opportunity of value-adding legal AI solutions. Recommendations include legal professionals investigating the advancement and availability of AI solutions for the purposes of utilising it to strategically augment and bolster their job functions. Further recommendations include investigations into understanding their company’s current capability and strength in comparison to their competitors and to understand how AI would augment their company performance to provide additional value in terms of insight and improve turn-around times. The final recommendation was for South African tertiary institutions of higher learning to start incorporating the topics of AI and Law into its Law Degree curriculum in an effort to make students aware of the advancement of AI in the area of Law and how it will affect their lives. The importance of this study is in the opinion of the professionals surveyed who believe that there was a strong possibility that they and their companies would hire fewer legal professionals if there was the availability of an economically beneficial legal AI solution which produced accurate, consistent, yield-producing output

Legal electronic institutions and ONTOMEDIA: dialogue, inventio, and relational justice scenarios

Since the seminal work by Perelman, Olbrechts-Tyteca, Toulmin, Ong, Giuliani and many others in late fifties and sixties, dialogue and argumentation have increasingly been at the center of philosophical discussions. Modelization of arguments and "argumentation schemes" constitute one of the main domains within the AI & Law field. The construction of Legal Electronic Institutions (LEI), and Ontomedia, an Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform in the context of the research carried out within the Catalan White Book on Mediation, has enhanced the discussion about fundamental issues on the theoretical approach taken in building such Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 tools. In this paper, I will address the question of how the content of ancient stasis, ekphrasis and inventio may be captured and reelaborated to define their theoretical backbones. I will call "relational justice" the conceptual legal framework in which Semantic Web strategies can be nested to offer a better user-centered service

Searching for arguments: applying a knowledge-based ontology of the legal domain.

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