LREC 2014 Workshop on
Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2014)
FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
31 May 2014, Reykjavik, Iceland
Workshop description
Since 2008, the LREC conference has provided a stimulating environment for the Workshop on
“Semantic Processing of Legal Texts” (SPLeT) that focus on the topics of Language Resources
(LRs) and Human Language Technologies (HLTs) in the legal domain. The 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. Along with the SPLeT workshops, there have been a number
of workshops and tutorials focussing on different aspects of semantic processing of legal texts at
conferences of the Artificial Intelligence and Law community (e.g. JURIX, ICAIL).
To continue this momentum and to advance research, we propose to hold the 5th edition of SPLeT
in conjunction with the LREC-2014. LREC provides a forum in which to report on applications of
linguistic technologies to particular domains as well as a context where individuals from academia
and industry can interact to discuss problems and opportunities, find new synergies, and promote
initiatives for international cooperation. Thus, the workshop at LREC will bring to the attention of
the broader LR/HLT 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.
Motivation and Topics of Interest
The last few years have seen a growing body of research and practice in the field of AI & Law
which addresses a range of topics: automated legal argumentation, semantic and cross-language
legal IR, document classification, legal drafting, legal knowledge extraction, as well as the
construction of legal ontologies and their application. In this context, it is of paramount importance
to use NLP techniques and tools that automate the process of knowledge extraction from legal texts.
Two special sessions will be organized around hot research areas: legal language resources and
Enhancing Access to Law. For what concerns the former, in line with LREC 2014 Special Highlight
we encourage the submission of descriptions of legal resources to be possibly included in the LREC
Repository of shared LRs with the final aim of constructing a map of legal language resources,
enabling their reuse (in reproducing and evaluating experiments) and extension. The resources
might include: annotated corpora, lexicons, thesauri and ontologies as well as semantic processing
tools, amongst others. Concerning the second hot topic, we are particularly interested in
submissions on NLP-based techniques for getting access to semantic information, including
visualization of legal content and network analysis in the legal domain to uncover relationships
between legal documents (e.g. citation analysis).
Topics of interest for the general workshop session include but are not limited to:
- Building legal resources: terminologies, ontologies, corpora
- NLP for legal Open Data
- Ontologies of legal texts
- Information retrieval and extraction from legal texts
- Parsing legal texts
- Semantic annotation of legal texts
- Legal text processing
- Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing
- Automatic Classification of legal documents
- Logical analysis of legal language
- Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism
- Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments
- Dialogue protocols for argumentation
- Legal argument ontology
- Computational theories of argumentation suitable to natural language
- Controlled language systems for law
- Legal interface design and engineering
- Legal education applications
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. Short
papers can also include descriptions of existing language resources. Full papers should report
original results (also including newly developed language resources). 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 TBA. The only
accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF. Submission will be electronic using START
paper submission software available at TBA.
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. Further information on this new initiative will be provided soon.
Publication
Extended and revised versions of selected papers will be peer-reviewed and published in a Special
Issue of the AI and Law Journal (https://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/10506)
Organizing committee
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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)
Giulia Venturi (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of CNR, Pisa, Italy)
Adam Wyner (Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, UK)
Contact
Address any queries regarding the workshop to: lrec_legalWS@ilc.cnr.it
Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: 10 February 2014
Acceptance notification sent: 10 March 2014
Final version deadline: 28 March 2014
Workshop date: 31 May 2014
Programme Committee
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Kevin Ashley (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Mohammad Al-Asswad (Cornell University)
Anderson Bertoldi (Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil)
Danièle Bourcier (Humboldt Universität, Germany) tbc
Thomas R. Bruce (Cornell Law School, USA)
Pompeu Casanovas (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Jack Conrad (Thomson-Reuters, USA)
Michael Curtotti (Australian National University)
Matthias Grabmair (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Antonio Lazari (Scuola Superiore S.Anna, Italy) tbc
Marie-Francine Moens (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
Thom Neale (Sunlight Foundation, USA)
Karel Pala (Masaryk University, Czech Republic)
Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de Évora, Portugal)
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Tony Russell-Rose (UXLabs, UK) tbc
Erich Schweighofer (Universität Wien, Austria)
Rolf Schwitter (Macquarie University, Australia)
Daniela Tiscornia (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell’Informazione Giuridica of CNR, Florence,
Italy)
Tom van Engers (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Vern R. Walker (Hofstra University, USA)
Radboud Winkels (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands