Using the event calculus for tracking the normative state of contracts

In this work, we have been principally concerned with the representation of contracts so that their normative state may be tracked in an automated fashion over their deployment lifetime. The normative state of a contract, at a particular time, is the aggregation of instances of normative relations that hold between contract parties at that time, plus the current values of contract variables. The effects of contract events on the normative state of a contract are specified using an XML formalisation of the Event Calculus, called ecXML. We use an example mail service agreement from the domain of web services to ground the discussion of our work. We give a characterisation of the agreement according to the normative concepts of: obligation, power and permission, and show how the ecXML representation may be used to track the state of the agreement, according to a narrative of contract events. We also give a description of a state tracking architecture, and a contract deployment tool, both of which have been implemented in the course of our work.

Research in progress: report on the ICAIL 2017 doctoral consortium

This paper arose out of the 2017 international conference on AI and law doctoral consortium. There were five students who presented their Ph.D. work, and each of them has contributed a section to this paper. The paper offers a view of what topics are currently engaging students, and shows the diversity of their interests and influences

A Meta-level Annotation Language for Legal Texts

There are many legal texts which can greatly benefit from the supportof automated reasoning. Such support depends on the existence of a logical for-malization of the legal text. Among the methods used for the creation of theseknowledge bases, annotation tools attempt to abstract over the logical languageand support non-logicians in their efforts to formalize documents. Nevertheless,legal documents use a rich language which is not easy to annotate. In this paper,an existing annotation tool is being extended in order to support the formalization of a complex example - the GDPR’s article 13. The complexity of the article prevents a direct annotation using logical and deontical operators. This is overcome by the implementation of several macros. We demonstrate the automated reasoning over the formalized article and argue that macros can be used to formalizecomplex legal texts