10 research outputs found
On the concept of relevance in legal information retrieval
The concept of 'relevance' is crucial to legal information retrieval, but because of its intuitive understanding it goes undefined too easily and unexplored too often. We discuss a conceptual framework on relevance within legal information retrieval, based on a typology of relevance dimensions used within general information retrieval science, but tailored to the specific features of legal information. This framework can be used for the development and improvement of legal information retrieval systems
An agent-based architecture for online dispute resolution services
Tese de doutoramento em "Philosophy in Informatics"Conflicts are a natural consequence of our daily social interactions
and should be regarded as opportunities to improve some aspect,
condition or flaw. In order for conflicts to have positive outcomes, not
only from an economical view but also concerning the maintenance
of good interpersonal-relationships, tools are needed that can explain
to the parties the inner mechanisms of the conflict resolution process,
its restrictions and its rules. Only well-informed parties can take good
and realistic decisions and better understand the others’.
In this thesis, the most important aspects in a conflict resolution
process concerning the aforementioned are identified, with the objective
of designing a tool that can effectively support the parties from
the beginning to the end of the conflict. The resulting tool, UMCourt
, has as main objective to support decisions by providing the right
information in the right moment to the right stakeholders.
Specifically, several problems are addressed that include the definition
of a suitable agent-based architecture, the building of important
knowledge and the support in the negotiation process, either by generating
solutions or by analysing the behaviour of the parties.
This last issue is addressed in more detail in this thesis. In fact, the
most serious drawback that was identified in current conflict resolution
methods is their complete disregard for contextual and subjective
information about the parties: the trend has been, for many years, to
focus on the objective aspects of the conflict.
The main contribution of this thesis is a vision on conflict resolution
that goes the other way around: asides from objective information, decisions
should also be based on contextual features such as our level
of stress, body language, attitudes or our conflict handling style. We
rely on this information on a daily basis to communicate efficiently.
It results only logical that it should be included in conflict resolution
methods that rely so heavily on communication.
The approach put forward relies on the analysis of the individual’s
behaviour in order to infer such context information. Disputant
parties and, in particular, mediators and negotiators, can better understand
the state of the participants and take better decisions (e.g. make
a pause, understand how a party is affected by an issue). This is particularly
important when online dispute resolution methods that rely
on cold and impersonal communication technologies (often constituting
a barrier to efficient communication) are used.Os conflitos são uma consequência natural das nossas interações sociais
e devem ser vistos como oportunidades para melhorar determinados
aspetos, condições ou mesmo falhas. Para que tenham resultados
positivos, não só do ponto de vista económico mas também do
ponto de vista das relações interpessoais, são necessárias ferramentas
que expliquem às partes as particularidades do processo, as suas
restrições e as suas regras. Apenas partes bem informadas podem
tomar decisões realísticas e melhor entender as decisões dos restantes.
Nesta tese, os aspetos mais importantes num processo de resolução
de conflitos são identificados, com o objetivo de definir uma ferramenta
que possa, efetivamente, suportar as partes do início ao fim do
conflito. A ferramenta resultante, designada UMCourt , tem como
principal objetivo suportar decisões fornecendo a informação certa
no momento certo às entidades certas. Especificamente, vários problemas
são atacados que incluem a definição de uma arquitetura de
software adequada, a construção de conhecimento e o suporte à negociação,
quer através da geração de soluções quer através da análise
comportamental das partes.
Este último tópico é tratado em mais detalhe nesta tese. De facto,
a limitação mais significante que foi identificada nos atuais métodos
de resolução de conflitos é a negligência da importância dos fatores
contextuais e da informação subjetiva acerca das partes: a tendência
tem sido no sentido de se focarem apenas nos aspetos objetivos.
A principal contribuição desta tese é a de uma visão do processo
de resolução de conflitos que aponta no sentido oposto: para além
da informação objetiva, as decisões devem também ser baseadas em
aspetos contextuais tais como o nível de stress, a linguagem corporal
ou o estilo de lidar com o conflito. Enquanto indivíduos, baseamonos
nestes aspetos diariamente para comunicar de forma eficiente.
É portanto lógico que tal informação seja incluída em métodos de
resolução de conflitos que se baseiam de forma tão clara na comunicação.
A abordagem proposta baseia-se na análise comportamental de
cada indivíduo para aquisiçao da informação de contexto. As partes
em conflito e, em particular, os mediadores e negociadores, podem
entender melhor o estado de todos os participantes e tomar melhores
decisões (e.g. fazer uma pausa, perceber como uma parte é afetada
por uma questão). Isto é especialmente importante quando são usados
métodos de resolução de conflitos em linha baseados no uso de
tecnologias de comunicação frias e impessoais, que geralmente configuram
elas próprias um obstáculo à eficiência da comunicação
Automatic extraction and structure of arguments in legal documents
A argumentação desempenha um papel fundamental na comunicação humana ao formular razões
e tirar conclusões. Desenvolveu-se um sistema automático para identificar argumentos jurídicos de
forma eficaz em termos de custos a partir da jurisprudência. Usando 42 leis jurídicas do Tribunal
Europeu dos Direitos Humanos (ECHR), anotou-se os documentos para estabelecer um conjunto de
dados “padrão-ouro”.
Foi então desenvolvido e testado um processo composto por 3 etapas para mineração de argumentos.
A primeira etapa foi avaliar o melhor conjunto de recursos para identificar automaticamente as
frases argumentativas do texto não estruturado. Várias experiencias foram conduzidas dependendo
do tipo de características disponíveis no corpus, a fim de determinar qual abordagem que produzia
os melhores resultados. No segundo estágio, introduziu-se uma nova abordagem de agrupamento
automático (para agrupar frases num argumento legal coerente), através da utilização de dois novos
algoritmos: o “Algoritmo de Identificação do Grupo Apropriado”, ACIA e a “Distribuição de orações
no agrupamento de Cluster”, DSCA. O trabalho inclui também um sistema de avaliação do algoritmo
de agrupamento que permite ajustar o seu desempenho. Na terceira etapa do trabalho, utilizou-se
uma abordagem híbrida de técnicas estatísticas e baseadas em regras para categorizar as orações
argumentativas.
No geral, observa-se que o nível de precisão e utilidade alcançado por essas novas técnicas é viável
como base para uma estrutura geral de argumentação e mineração; Abstract:
Automatic Extraction and Structure of
Arguments in Legal Documents
Argumentation plays a cardinal role in human communication when formulating reasons and drawing
conclusions. A system to automatically identify legal arguments cost-effectively from case-law
was developed. Using 42 legal case-laws from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), an
annotation was performed to establish a ‘gold-standard’ dataset. Then a three-stage process for
argument mining was developed and tested.
The first stage aims at evaluating the best set of features for automatically identifying argumentative
sentences within unstructured text. Several experiments were conducted, depending upon the type
of features available in the corpus, in order to determine which approach yielded the best result.
In the second stage, a novel approach to clustering (for grouping sentences automatically into a
coherent legal argument) was introduced through the development of two new algorithms: the
“Appropriate Cluster Identification Algorithm”,(ACIA) and the “Distribution of Sentence to the
Cluster Algorithm” (DSCA). This work also includes a new evaluation system for the clustering
algorithm, which helps tuning it for performance. In the third stage, a hybrid approach of statistical
and rule-based techniques was used in order to categorize argumentative sentences.
Overall, it’s possible to observe that the level of accuracy and usefulness achieve by these new
techniques makes it viable as the basis of a general argument-mining framework
Methods and tools for analysis and management of risks and regulatory compliance in the healthcare sector: the Hospital at Home – HaH
Changing or creating a new organization means creating a new process. Each process involves many risks that need to be identified and managed. The main risks considered here are procedural risks and legal risks. The former are related to the risks of errors that may occur during processes, while the latter are related to the compliance of processes with regulations. Therefore, managing the risks implies proposing changes to the processes that allow the desired result: an optimized process. In order to manage a company and optimize it in the best possible way, not only should the organizational aspect, risk management and legal compliance be taken into account, but it is important that they are all analyzed simultaneously with the aim of finding the right balance that satisfies them all. This is exactly the aim of this thesis, to provide methods and tools to balance these three characteristics, and to enable this type of optimization, ICT support is used. This work is not intended to be a computer science or law thesis but an interdisciplinary thesis. Most of the work done so far is vertical and in a specific domain. The particularity and aim of this thesis is not so much to carry out an in-depth analysis of a particular aspect, but rather to combine several important aspects, normally analyzed separately, which however have an impact on each other and influence each other. In order to carry out this kind of interdisciplinary analysis, the knowledge base of both areas was involved and the combination and collaboration of different experts in the various fields was necessary. Although the methodology described is generic and can be applied to all sectors, a particular use case was chosen to show its application. The case study considered is a new type of healthcare service that allows patients in acute disease to be hospitalized to their home. This provide the possibility to perform experiments using real hospital database
Methods and tools for analysis and management of risks and regulatory compliance in the healthcare sector: the hospital at home – HaH
Changing or creating an organisation means creating a new process. Each process involves many risks that need to be identified and managed. The main risks considered here are procedural and legal risks. The former are related to the risks of errors that may occur during processes, while the latter are related to the compliance of processes with regulations. Managing the risks implies proposing changes to the processes that allow the desired result: an optimised process.
In order to manage a company and optimise it in the best possible way, not only should the organisational aspect, risk management and legal compliance be taken into account, but it is important that they are all analysed simultaneously with the aim of finding the right balance that satisfies them all. This is the aim of this thesis, to provide methods and tools to balance these three characteristics, and to enable this type of optimisation, ICT support is used.
This work isn’t a thesis in computer science or law, but rather an interdisciplinary thesis. Most of the work done so far is vertical and in a specific domain. The particularity and aim of this thesis is not to carry out an in-depth analysis of a particular aspect, but rather to combine several important aspects, normally analysed separately, which however have an impact and influence each other. In order to carry out this kind of interdisciplinary analysis, the knowledge base of both areas was involved and the combination and collaboration of different experts in the various fields was necessary.
Although the methodology described is generic and can be applied to all sectors, the case study considered is a new type of healthcare service that allows patients in acute disease to be hospitalised to their home. This provide the possibility to perform experiments using real hospital database
Behavioral Economics & Machine Learning Expanding the Field Through a New Lens
In this thesis, I investigate central questions in behavioral economics as well as law and economics. I examine well-studied problems through a new methodological lens. The aim is to generate new insights and thus point behavioral scientists to novel analytical tools. To this end, I show how machine learning may be used to build new theories by reducing complexity in experimental economic data. Moreover, I use natural language processing to show how supervised learning can enable the scientific community to expand limited datasets. I also investigate the normative impact of the use of such tools in social science research or decision-making as well as their deficiencies