Legal knowledge-based systems: new directions in system design

This thesis examines and critiques the concept of 'legal knowledge-based’ systems. Work on legal knowledge-based systems is dominated by work in 'artificial intelligence and law’. It seeks to automate the application of law and to automate the solution of legal problems. Automation however, has proved elusive. In contrast to such automation, this thesis proposes the creation of legal knowledge-based systems based on the concept of augmentation of legal work. Focusing on systems that augment legal work opens new possibilities for system creation and use. To inform how systems might augment legal work, this thesis examines philosophy, psychology and legal theory for information they provide on how processes of legal reasoning operate. It is argued that, in contrast to conceptions of law adopted in artificial intelligence and law, 'sensemaking' provides a useful perspective with which to create systems. It is argued that visualisation, and particularly diagrams, are an important and under considered element of reasoning and that producing systems that support diagramming of processes of legal reasoning would provide useful support for legal work. This thesis reviews techniques for diagramming aspects of sensemaking. In particular this thesis examines standard methods for diagramming arguments and methods for diagramming reasoning. These techniques are applied in the diagramming of legal judgments. A review is conducted of systems that have been constructed to support the construction of diagrams of argument and reasoning. Drawing upon these examinations, this thesis highlights the necessity of appropriate representations for supporting reasoning. The literature examining diagramming for reasoning support provides little discussion of appropriate representations. This thesis examines theories of representation for insight they can provide into the design of appropriate representations. It is concluded that while the theories of representation that are examined do not determine what amounts to a good representation, guidelines for the design and choice of representations can be distilled. These guidelines cannot map the class of legal knowledge-based systems that augment legal sensemaking, they can however, be used to explore this class and to inform construction of systems

Hyper-Text-Linguistik

This doctoral thesis suggests a text-linguistic approach dealing with linked electronic texts, so called HYPERTEXTS. After explaining the concept and philosophy of the hypertext-idea and elaborating on a pragmatic definition of WWW-hypertexts (Part A of the thesis), a linguistic framework, the Textlinguistisches Analysemodell für Hypertexte (TAH), is proposed (Part B). TAH provides a pragmatic-functional, top-down model to analyze CONTEXT, FUNCTION and STRUCTURE of complete hypertexts and the hypertext-components NODE and LINK. Main aim of TAH is to strictly separate the different aspects of each hypertext- and linguistic level – without isolating them. The theoretical approach of TAH is used for a case study (Part C). Therefore a corpus of WWW-hypertexts, mainly informative and instructive ones, is examined with TAH-methods. Aim of this study is on the one hand to provide some sort of evidence for the plausibility of TAH and is on the other hand linked with a specific question of research: It deals with possibilities provided by linguistics to enhance hypertext-links with logically, semantically and/or rhetorically typed information. The conclusion of the study is to distinguish exactly between semantics of a deepstructure-knowledge-presentation, semantic and rhetoric relations of the surface, i.e. the hypertext the user can see, and the layout or traversal behavior respectively of the user interface, i.e. the browsersoftware. Part C mainly deals with problems of typed links on the surface of hypertexts