Framing a Knowledge Base for a Legal Expert System Dealing with Indeterminate Concepts

Despite decades of development of formal tools for modelling legal knowledge and reasoning, the creation of a fully fledged legal decision support system remains challenging. Among those challenges, such system requires an enormous amount of commonsense knowledge to derive legal expertise. This paper describes the development of a negotiation decision support system (the Parenting Plan Support System or PPSS) to support parents in drafting an agreement (the parenting plan) for the exercise of parental custody of minor children after a divorce is granted. The main objective here is to discuss problems of framing an intuitively appealing and computationally efficient knowledge base that can adequately represent the indeterminate legal concept of the well-being of the child in the context of continental legal culture and of Polish law in particular. In addition to commonsense reasoning, interpretation of such a concept demands both legal expertise and significant professional knowledge from other domains

A methodology for designing systems to reason with legal cases using Abstract Dialectical Frameworks

This paper presents a methodology to design and implement programs intended to decide cases, described as sets of factors, according to a theory of a particular domain based on a set of precedent cases relating to that domain. We use Abstract Dialectical Frameworks (ADFs), a recent development in AI knowledge representation, as the central feature of our design method. ADFs will play a role akin to that played by Entity–Relationship models in the design of database systems. First, we explain how the factor hierarchy of the well-known legal reasoning system CATO can be used to instantiate an ADF for the domain of US Trade Secrets. This is intended to demonstrate the suitability of ADFs for expressing the design of legal cased based systems. The method is then applied to two other legal domains often used in the literature of AI and Law. In each domain, the design is provided by the domain analyst expressing the cases in terms of factors organised into an ADF from which an executable program can be implemented in a straightforward way by taking advantage of the closeness of the acceptance conditions of the ADF to components of an executable program. We evaluate the ease of implementation, the performance and efficacy of the resulting program, ease of refinement of the program and the transparency of the reasoning. This evaluation suggests ways in which factor based systems, which are limited by taking as their starting point the representation of cases as sets of factors and so abstracting away the particular facts, can be extended to address open issues in AI and Law by incorporating the case facts to improve the decision, and by considering justification and reasoning using portion of precedents

Rozwiązywanie sytuacji konfliktowych w wymiarze jednostkowym i społecznym

O konflikcie jako zjawisku i procesie społecznym nigdy za wiele, zwłaszcza gdy w jednym tomie można znaleźć analizy teoretyczne źródeł i istoty konfliktu, jego konstruktywnego potencjału, jak i dysfunkcjonalności wobec relacji społecznych i społecznego ładu. Zagadnienia te omawiane są przez socjologów, pedagogów, psychologów, teoretyków prawa oraz praktyków zajmujących się ich rozwiązywaniem: pracowników socjalnych, terapeutów, mediatorów, negocjatorów, prokuratorów, sędziów, menedżerów. Oprócz diagnoz dotyczących sfer życia społecznego szczególnie zagrożonych konfliktem (stosunki międzynarodowe, sfera publiczna, edukacja i wychowanie) czytelnik znajdzie w książce opracowania na temat różnych dróg wychodzenia z konfliktu poprzez kompromis do konsensusu, z użyciem różnych narzędzi społecznych, takich jak: negocjacje, arbitraż, a zwłaszcza mediacje