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

Beyond Logic Programming for Legal Reasoning

Logic programming has long being advocated for legal reasoning, and several approaches have been put forward relying upon explicit representation of the law in logic programming terms. In this position paper we focus on the PROLEG logic-programming-based framework for formalizing and reasoning with Japanese presupposed ultimate fact theory. Specifically, we examine challenges and opportunities in leveraging deep learning techniques for improving legal reasoning using PROLEG identifying four distinct options ranging from enhancing fact extraction using deep learning to end-to-end solutions for reasoning with textual legal descriptions. We assess advantages and limitations of each option, considering their technical feasibility, interpretability, and alignment with the needs of legal practitioners and decision-makers. We believe that our analysis can serve as a guideline for developers aiming to build effective decision-support systems for the legal domain, while fostering a deeper understanding of challenges and potential advancements by neuro-symbolic approaches in legal applications.Comment: Workshop on Logic Programming and Legal Reasoning, @ICLP 202

Die Ambiguität nichtwörtlicher Bedeutung. Zur Semantik und Pragmatik der Nichtwörtlichkeitsindikatoren regelrecht und sozusagen im Deutschen

Diese Arbeit untersucht die formalsemantische Analyse nichtwörtlicher Äußerungen. Zu diesem Zweck wird zunächst ein Kriterium entwickelt, anhand dessen wörtliche und nichtwörtliche Lesarten in Korpusstudien unterschieden werden können. In einem weiteren Schritt werden im Rahmen einer Korpusstudie die Lexeme regelrecht und sozusagen auf ihre Eignung als Nichtwörtlichkeitsindikatoren überprüft. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sowohl regelrecht als auch sozusagen nichtwörtliche Äußerungen vorhersagen können. Aus diesem Grund werden die beiden Lexeme formalsemantisch analysiert, um deren Beitrag zur Komposition herauszustellen. Die zentrale These ist dabei, dass der formalsemantischen Analyse nichtwörtlicher Äußerungen mehr Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt werden sollte, als dies bislang der Fall war