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

Solving a murder case by asking critical questions:an approach to fact-finding in terms of argumentation and story schemes

In this paper, we look at reasoning with evidence and facts in criminal cases. We show how this reasoning may be analysed in a dialectical way by means of critical questions that point to typical sources of doubt. We discuss critical questions about the evidential arguments adduced, about the narrative accounts of the facts considered, and about the way in which the arguments and narratives are connected in an analysis. Our treatment shows how two different types of knowledge, represented as schemes, play a role in reasoning with evidence: argumentation schemes and story schemes

A hybrid formal theory of arguments, stories and criminal evidence

This paper presents a theory of reasoning with evidence in order to determine the facts in a criminal case. The focus is on the process of proof, in which the facts of the case are determined, rather than on related legal issues, such as the admissibility of evidence. In the literature, two approaches to reasoning with evidence can be distinguished, one argument-based and one story-based. In an argument-based approach to reasoning with evidence, the reasons for and against the occurrence of an event, e.g., based on witness testimony, are central. In a story-based approach, evidence is evaluated and interpreted from the perspective of the factual stories as they may have occurred in a case, e.g., as they are defended by the prosecution. In this paper, we argue that both arguments and narratives are relevant and useful in the reasoning with and interpretation of evidence. Therefore, a hybrid approach is proposed and formally developed, doing justice to both the argument-based and the narrative-based perspective. By the formalization of the theory and the associated graphical representations, our proposal is the basis for the design of software developed as a tool to make sense of the evidence in complex cases

Coherence and Credibility in the Story-Model of Jurors’ Decision-Making: Does Mental Simulation Really Drive the Evaluation of the Evidence?

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