SPLeT 2012 - Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT 2012)

LREC 2012 Workshop on
Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012)
CALL FOR PAPERS
27 May 2012, Istanbul
EXTENDED DEADLINE: 19 February 2012
**Workshop description
The legal domain represents a primary candidate for web-based
information distribution, exchange and management, as testified by the
numerous e-government, e-justice and e-democracy initiatives
worldwide. The last few years have seen a growing body of research and
practice in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Law which
addresses a range of topics: automated legal reasoning and
argumentation, semantic and cross-language legal information
retrieval, document classification, legal drafting, legal knowledge
discovery and extraction, as well as the construction of legal
ontologies and their application to the law domain. In this context,
it is of paramount importance to use Natural Language Processing
techniques and tools that automate and facilitate the process of
knowledge extraction from legal texts.
Since 2008, the SPLeT workshops have been a venue where researchers
from the Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence and Law
communities meet, exchange information, compare perspectives, and
share experiences and concerns on the topic of legal knowledge
extraction and management, with particular emphasis on the semantic
processing of legal texts. Within the Artificial Intelligence and Law
community, there have also been a number of dedicated workshops and
tutorials specifically focussing on different aspects of semantic
processing of legal texts at conferences such as JURIX-2008,
ICAIL-2009, ICAIL-2011, as well as in the International Summer School
“Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web” (2007, 2008, 2009,
2010, 2011).
To continue this momentum and to advance research, a 4th Workshop on
“Semantic Processing of Legal Texts” is being organized at the
LREC-2012 conference to bring to the attention of the broader LR/HLT
(Language Resources/Human Language Technology) community the specific
technical challenges posed by the semantic processing of legal texts
and also share with the community the motivations and objectives which
make it of interest to researchers in legal informatics. The outcome
of these interactions are expected to advance research and
applications and foster interdisciplinary collaboration within the
legal domain.
New to this edition of the workshop are two sub-events to provide
common and consistent task definitions, datasets, and evaluation for
legal-IE systems along with a forum for the presentation of varying
but focused efforts on their development.
The first sub-event will be a shared task specifically focusing on
dependency parsing of legal texts: although this is not a
domain-specific task, it is a task which creates the prerequisites for
advanced IE applications operating on legal texts, which can benefit
from reliable preprocessing tools. For this year our aim is to create
the prerequisites for more advanced domain-specific tasks (e.g. event
extraction) to be organized in future SPLeT editions. We strongly
believe that this could be a way to attract the attention of the
LR/HLT community to the specific challenges posed by the analysis of
this type of texts and to have a clearer idea of the current state of
the art. The languages dealt with will be Italian and English. A
specific Call for Participation for the shared task is available at
http://poesix1.ilc.cnr.it/splet_shared_task/
The second sub-event will be an online, manual, collaborative,
semantic annotation exercise, the results of which will be presented
and discussed at the workshop. The goals of the exercise are: (1) to
gain insight on and work towards the creation of a gold standard
corpus of legal documents in a cohesive domain; and (2) to test the
feasibility of the exercise and to get feedback on its annotation
structure and workflow. The corpus to be annotated will be a selection
of documents drawn from EU and US legislation, regulation, and case
law in a particular domain (e.g. consumer or environmental
protection). For this exercise, the language will be English. A
specific Call for Participation for this annotation exercise is
available at http://wyner.info/LanguageLogicLawSoftware/?p=744.
The main goals of the workshop and associated events are to provide an
overview of the state-of-the-art in legal knowledge extraction and
management, to explore new research and development directions and
emerging trends, and to exchange information regarding legal language
resources and human language technologies and their applications.
**Areas of Interest
The workshop will focus on the topics of the automatic extraction of
information from legal texts and the structural organisation of the
extracted knowledge. Particular emphasis will be given to the crucial
role of language resources and human language technologies.
Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics:
1. Construction, extension, merging, customization of legal language
resources, e.g. terminologies, thesauri, ontologies, corpora
2. Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts
3. Semantic annotation of legal text
4. Legal text processing
5. Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing
6. Legal thesauri mapping
7. Automatic Classification of legal documents
8. Logical analysis of legal language
9. Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments
into a logical formalism
10. Dialogue protocols for legal information processing
11. Controlled language systems for law
**Submissions
Submissions are solicited from researchers working on all aspects of
semantic processing of legal texts. Authors are invited to submit
papers describing original completed work, work in progress,
interesting problems, case studies or research trends related to one
or more of the topics of interest listed above. The final version of
the accepted papers will be published in the Workshop Proceedings.
Short or full papers can be submitted. Short papers are expected to
present new ideas or new visions that may influence the direction of
future research, yet they may be less mature than full papers. While
an exhaustive evaluation of the proposed ideas is not necessary,
insight and in-depth understanding of the issues is expected. Full
papers should be more well developed and evaluated. Short papers will
be reviewed the same way as full papers by the Program Committee and
will be published in the Workshop Proceedings.
Full paper submissions should not exceed 10 pages, short papers 6
pages; both should be typeset using a font size of 11 points. Style
files will be made available by LREC for the camera-ready versions of
accepted papers. Papers should be submitted electronically, no later
than February 10, 2012. The only accepted format for submitted papers
is Adobe PDF. Submission will be electronic using START paper
submission software available at at
https://www.softconf.com/lrec2012/LegalTexts2012/.
Note that when submitting a paper through the START page, authors will
be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad
sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that
have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result
of your research. For further information on this new initiative,
please refer to
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2012/?LRE-Map-2012.
**Selected contributions to a Special Issue of AI&Law Journal
After the Workshop a number of selected, revised, peer-reviewed
articles will be published in a Special Issue on Semantic Processing
of Legal Texts of the AI and Law Journal (Springer).
**Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: 19 February 2012 **EXTENDED DEADLINE**
Acceptance notification sent: 5 March 2012
Final version deadline: 23 March 2012
Workshop date: 27 May 2012
**Workshop Chairs
- Enrico Francesconi (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione
Giuridica of CNR, Florence, Italy)
- Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of CNR,
Pisa, Italy)
- Wim Peters (Natural Language Processing Research Group, University
of Sheffield, UK)
- Adam Wyner (Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, UK)
**Address any queries regarding the workshop to: lrec_legalWS-AT-ilc.cnr.it
**Program Committee
1. Kevin Ashley (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
2. Johan Bos (University of Groningen, Netherlands)
3. Danièle Bourcier (Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany)
4. Jack Conrad (Thomson-Reuters, USA)
5. Matthias Grabmair (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
6. Antonio Lazari (Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Pisa, Italy)
7. Alessandro Lenci (Dipartimento di Linguistica, Università di Pisa, Italy)
8. Leonardo Lesmo (Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Italy)
9. Thorne McCarty (Reutgers University, USA)
10. Raquel Mochales Palau (Nuance International, Belgium)
11. Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de Évora, Portugal)
12. Tony Russell-Rose (UXLabs, UK)
13. Erich Schweighofer (Universität Wien, Rechtswissenschaftliche
Fakultät, Wien, Austria)
14. Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University, Australia)
15. Manfred Stede (University of Potsdam, Germany)
16. Daniela Tiscornia (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione
Giuridica of CNR, Florence, Italy)
17. Tom van Engers (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam,
Netherlands)
18. Giulia Venturi (Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Pisa, Italy)
19. Vern R. Walker (Hofstra University School of Law, Hofstra University, USA)
20. Stephan Walter (Germany)
21. Radboud Winkels (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam,
Netherlands)