ACILA

Automatic Detection and Classification of Arguments in a Legal Case

Aims

The ACILA project regards argumentation analysis, a relatively new area at the intersection of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and Legal Information Systems. The aims of this project are a study of argumentation in written discourse resulting in an empirical evaluation of theoretical models underlying basic artificial intelligence research, and the implementation of a proof-of-concept system that detects, classifies and visualizes arguments in the texts of legal decisions. The project potentially opens up many opportunities for making theoretical artificial intelligence research practically applicable.

Results

We have built a ground-truth corpus (texts from the European Court of Human Rights), which was annotated by 3 annotators under supervision of a legal expert. We have explored basic features (linguistic, lexical, structural) for discriminating argumentative from non-argumentive discourse. We have implemented and evaluated both symbolic and machine learning techniques to identify the premises, conclusions and non-argumentative information on a clause and sentence level. Our current research focuses on the detection of the structure of argumentation in text.



Period From 2006-10-01 to 2010-09-30.
Financed by Onderzoeksfonds K.U.Leuven OT/06/03
Supervised by Marie-Francine Moens
Staff Raquel Mochales Palau
Contact Raquel Mochales Palau

Publications

  1. MOENS, Marie-Francine. Summarizing Court Decisions. Information Processing & Management, 43 (6), 1748-1764. 2007
  2. MOENS, Marie-Francine, BOIY, Erik, MOCHALES PALAU, Raquel and REED, Chris. Automatic Detection of Arguments in Legal Texts. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (pp. 225-230). New York: ACM. 2007
  3. MOCHALES PALAU, Raquel and MOENS, Marie-Francine ACILA - Automatic Detection of Arguments in Legal Cases. In Proceedings of Workshop on Semantic Web Technology for Law. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University. 2007
  4. MOCHALES PALAU, Raquel & MOENS, Marie-Francine Study on Sentence Relations in the Automatic Detection of Argumentation in Legal cases. In Proceedings of JURIX 2007: The 20th Anniversary International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems . IOS Press. 2007
  5. MOCHALES PALAU, Raquel and MOENS, Marie-Francine Automatic Detection of Arguments in Legal Texts. In Proceedings of the 19th Belgian-Dutch Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Utrecht, the Netherlands. 2007
  6. REED,Chris, MOCHALES PALAU, Raquel, ROWE, Glenn and MOENS, Marie-Francine Language Resources for Studying Argument. In Proceedings of Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC) . Marrakech (Morocco) 2008
  7. MOCHALES PALAU, Raquel. & MOENS, Marie-Francine Automatic Argumentation Detection and Its Role in the Semantic Web. In J. BREUKER, P. CASANOVAS, M. KLEIN & E. FRANSCESCONI (Eds.), Law, Ontologies and the Semantic Web (Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications). Amsterdam: IOS Press. 2008
  8. MOCHALES PALAU, Raquel and MOENS, Marie-Francine Study on the Structure of Argumentation in Case Law. In Proceedings of JURIX 2008: The 21st International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems. IOS Press. 2008
  9. MOCHALES PALAU, Raquel and MOENS, Marie-Francine Argumentation Mining: The Detection, Classification and Structure of Arguments in Text. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. New York: ACM. (Best Student's Paper Award) 2009
  10. MOCHALES PALAU, Raquel and IEVEN, Aagje Creating an Argumentation Corpus: Do Theories Apply to Real Arguments? A Case Study on the Legal Argumentation of the ECHR. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. New York: ACM. 2009
  11. MOCHALES PALAU, Raquel & MOENS, Marie-Francine Argumentation Mining: The Detection, Classification and Structuring of Arguments in Text. In Proceedings of the 21st Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2009
  12. MOENS, Marie-Francine De slimme machine die kennis vergaart uit tekst. Karakter. 2009


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