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

Instrumentalization of Norm-Regulated Transition System Situations

An approach to normative systems in the context of multiagent systems (MAS) modeled as transition systems, in which actions are associated with transitions between different system states, is presented. The approach is based on relating the permission or prohibition of actions to the permission or prohibition of different types of state transitions with respect to some condition d on a number of agents x(1), ... , x(nu) in a state. It introduces the notion of a norm-regulated transition system situation, which is intended to represent a single step in the run of a (norm-regulated) transition system. The normative framework uses an algebraic representation of conditional norms and is based on a systematic exploration of the possible types of state transitions with respect to d(x(1), ... , x(nu)). A general-level Java/Prolog framework for norm-regulated transition system situations has been developed, and this implementation together with a simple example system is presented and discussed