Introduction to the Special Issue on Logic Rules and Reasoning: Selected Papers from the 2nd International Joint Conference on Rules and Reasoning (RuleML+RR 2018)

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An Automated Framework for the Extraction of Semantic Legal Metadata from Legal Texts

Semantic legal metadata provides information that helps with understanding and interpreting legal provisions. Such metadata is therefore important for the systematic analysis of legal requirements. However, manually enhancing a large legal corpus with semantic metadata is prohibitively expensive. Our work is motivated by two observations: (1) the existing requirements engineering (RE) literature does not provide a harmonized view on the semantic metadata types that are useful for legal requirements analysis; (2) automated support for the extraction of semantic legal metadata is scarce, and it does not exploit the full potential of artificial intelligence technologies, notably natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). Our objective is to take steps toward overcoming these limitations. To do so, we review and reconcile the semantic legal metadata types proposed in the RE literature. Subsequently, we devise an automated extraction approach for the identified metadata types using NLP and ML. We evaluate our approach through two case studies over the Luxembourgish legislation. Our results indicate a high accuracy in the generation of metadata annotations. In particular, in the two case studies, we were able to obtain precision scores of 97.2% and 82.4% and recall scores of 94.9% and 92.4%

A KLM Perspective on Defeasible Reasoning for Description Logics

In this paper we present an approach to defeasible reasoning for the description logic ALC. The results discussed here are based on work done by Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor (KLM) on defeasible conditionals in the propositional case. We consider versions of a preferential semantics for two forms of defeasible subsumption, and link these semantic constructions formally to KLM-style syntactic properties via representation results. In addition to showing that the semantics is appropriate, these results pave the way for more effective decision procedures for defeasible reasoning in description logics. With the semantics of the defeasible version of ALC in place, we turn to the investigation of an appropriate form of defeasible entailment for this enriched version of ALC. This investigation includes an algorithm for the computation of a form of defeasible entailment known as rational closure in the propositional case. Importantly, the algorithm relies completely on classical entailment checks and shows that the computational complexity of reasoning over defeasible ontologies is no worse than that of the underlying classical ALC. Before concluding, we take a brief tour of some existing work on defeasible extensions of ALC that go beyond defeasible subsumption

Hybrid Artificial Intelligence to extract patterns and rules from argumentative and legal texts

This Thesis is composed of a selection of studies realized between 2019 and 2022, whose aim is to find working methodologies of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning for the detection and classification of patterns and rules in argumentative and legal texts. We define our approach as “hybrid”, since different methods have been employed combining symbolic AI (which involves “top-dow” structured knowledge) and sub-symbolic AI (which involves “bottom-up” data-driven knowledge). The first group of these works was dedicated to the classification of argumentative patterns. Following the Waltonian model of argument (according to which arguments are composed by a set of premises and a conclusion), and the theory of Argumentation Schemes, this group of studies was focused on the detection of argumentative evidences of support and opposition. More precisely, the aim of these first works was to show that argumentative patterns of opposition and support could be classified at fine-grained levels and without resorting to highly engineered features. To show this, we firstly employed methodologies based on Tree Kernel classifiers and TFIDF. In these experiments, we explored different combinations of Tree Kernel calculation and different data structures (i.e., different tree structures). Also, some of these combinations employs a hybrid approach where the calculation of similarity among trees is influenced not only by the tree structures but also by a semantic layer (e.g. those using “smoothed” trees and “compositional” trees). After the encouraging results of this first phase, we explored the use of a new methodology which was deeply changing the NLP landscape exactly in that year, fostered and promoted by actors like Google, i.e. Transfer Learning and the use of language models. These newcomer methodologies markedly improved our previous results and provided us with stronger NLP tools. Using Transfer Learning, we were also able to perform a Sequence Labelling task for the recognition of the exact span of argumentative components (i.e. claims and premises), which is crucial to connect the sphere of natural language to the sphere of logic. The last part of this work was finally dedicated to show how to use Transfer Learning for the detection of rules and deontic modalities. In this case, we tried to explore a hybrid approach which combines structured knowledge coming from two LegalXML formats (i.e., Akoma Ntoso and LegalRuleML) with sub-symbolic knowledge coming from pre-trained (and then fine-tuned) neural architectures

A Method to Screen, Assess, and Prepare Open Data for Use

Open data's value-creating capabilities and innovation potential are widely recognized, resulting in a notable increase in the number of published open data sources. A crucial challenge for companies intending to leverage open data is to identify suitable open datasets that support specific business scenarios and prepare these datasets for use. Researchers have developed several open data assessment techniques, but those are restricted in scope, do not consider the use context, and are not embedded in the complete set of activities required for open data consumption in enterprises. Therefore, our research aims to develop prescriptive knowledge in the form of a meaningful method to screen, assess, and prepare open data for use in an enterprise setting. Our findings complement existing open data assessment techniques by providing methodological guidance to prepare open data of uncertain quality for use in a value-adding and demand-oriented manner, enabled by knowledge graphs and linked data concepts. From an academic perspective, our research conceptualizes open data preparation as a purposeful and value-creating process