Dialogue games for agent argumentation

A popular view of what Artificial Intelligence can do for lawyers is that it can do no more than deduce the consequences from a precisely stated set of facts and legal rules. This immediately makes many lawyers sceptical about the usefulness of such systems: this mechanical approach seems to leave out most of what is important in legal reasoning. A case does not appear as a set of facts, but rather as a story told by a client. For example, a man may come to his lawyer saying that he had developed an innovative product while working for Company A. Now Company B has made him an offer of a job, to develop a similar product for them. Can he do this? The lawyer firstly must interpret this story, in the context, so that it can be made to fit the framework of applicable law. Several interpretations may be possible. In our example it could be seen as being governed by his contract of employment, or as an issue in Trade Secrets law

A Quarter of Century in Artificial Intelligence and Law: Projects, Personal Trajectories, a Subjective PerspectiveLanguage, Culture, Computation. Computing of the Humanities, Law, and Narratives

This article describes projects in the domain of artificial intelligence and law, which resulted from the research of the five authors listed, when they formed teams (of the first author named and each one of the other authors). Therefore, the present paper offers a subjective perspective, from the viewpoint of personal trajectories within AI & Law. Several, though not all, of the projects concerned dealt with facets of legal evidence. These projects include: ALIBI (an AI planner generating exonerating accounts); a representation of Italy’s regional constitutions in a nested-relation representation (a precursor of XML); the application of kappa calculus and a probabilistic interpretation to a Scandinavian approach to evidential strength; the application of Petri Nets for representing temporal relations in mutual wills; Daedalus (Judge Asaro’s software assisting Italy’s examining magistrates with inquiries, and then when they turn prosecutors); a study in occurrences in court of allegations echoing the pretext archetype “The dog ate my homework” (even when the claim was not pretextuous); an application of Wigmore Charts to an analysis of both the argumentation and the rhetoric of an Italian arringa (final submissions to the court) from a real court case; editorial projects which promoted the emergence of evidence as a conspicuous field within AI & Law (thus overturning previous neglect); and a magnum opus (Nissan 2012a) which presents the state of the art of computational applications to legal evidence, police inquiries, or argumentation