SPLT 2008

LREC 2008 Workshop on SEMANTIC PROCESSING OF LEGAL TEXTS

CALL FOR PAPERS 27 May 2008, Marrakech, Morocco http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/IMG/ws/Legal.pdf

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 addressing aspects such as automated legal reasoning and argumentation, semantic and cross-language legal information retrieval, document classification, legal drafting, legal knowledge discovery and extraction. Many efforts have also been devoted to the construction of legal ontologies and their application to the law domain. A number of different Workshops and Conferences have been organised on these topics in the framework of the artificial intelligence and law community: among them, the ICAIL (International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law) and the Jurix (International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems) conferences, different workshops on Legal Ontologies (LEGONT) or on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques (LOAIT). The availability of lexical resources to enforce semantic interoperability among legal information is an emerging topic within the workshops held by the Legal XML Community (LegalXML workshops and Legal XML Summer school). In all these events, the topics of language resources and human language technologies are receiving increasing attention: natural language processing techniques are resorted to for bootstrapping lexical, terminological and ontological legal resources and for the semantic mark-up of legal texts; natural language processing components are used in application areas such as conceptual and cross-lingual retrieval, legal drafting support, and document classification; legal ontologies are used for legal knowledge representation, legal reasoning and drafting, concepts comparison and consistency checking. On the other hand, little attention has been paid to the legal domain within the computational linguistics community besides a few and isolated contributions and/or projects devoted to the processing of legal texts. In this situation, we believe that time is now ripe for offering a workshop on Language Resources (LRs) and Human Language Technologies (HLTs) in the legal domain, in which the two communities can 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. Such an event could be beneficial to both communities, with the legal artificial intelligence community gaining insight on state-of-the-art linguistic technologies, tools and resources, and the computational linguists taking advantage of the large and often multilingual legal resources �?? corpora as well as lexicons and ontologies - for training and evaluation of current NLP technologies and tools. The workshop will be focussed on the topic of automatically extracting relevant information out of legal texts and of providing a structured organisation of extracted knowledge, and in particular on the crucial role played by language resources and human language technologies. The main goal of the workshop is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in the application area of legal knowledge extraction and management, explore new research and development directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding legal LRs and HLTs and their applications. Areas of Interest Papers are invited on, but not limited to, the following topics: - Building legal resources: terminologies, ontologies, corpora - Ontology learning from legal texts, including sub-areas such as ontology customization, ontology merging, ontology extension, ontology evolution, etc. - Information Extraction from legal texts - Semantic annotation of legal texts - Legal text processing - Multilingual aspects of legal text semantic processing - Comparison of Legal concepts - Diachronic meaning evolution of legal concepts - Standardization of metadata for Content description - Legal thesauri mapping - Automatic Classification of legal documents - NLP and legal information retrieval and extraction Papers can cover one or more of these areas. Submissions Submissions are solicited from researchers working on all aspects of semantic processing of legal texts. Authors are invited to submit full 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. Submissions should not exceed 10 pages and 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 15, 2008. The only accepted format for submitted papers is Adobe PDF. Papers should be submitted to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lrec08_legalws. The final version of the accepted papers will be published in the Workshop Proceedings. Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: 15 February 2008 Acceptance notification sent: 17 March 2008 Final version deadline: 10 April 2008 Workshop date: 27 May 2008 Workshop Chairs -        Simonetta Montemagni (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of CNR, Pisa, Italy) -        Daniela Tiscornia / Enrico Francesconi (Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell�??Informazione Giuridica of CNR, Florence, Italy) -        Wim Peters (Natural Language Processing Research Group, University of Sheffield, UK) Address any queries regarding the workshop to: lrec08_legalWS@ilc.cnr.it

Program Committee Danièle Bourcier (Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany) Paul Bourgine (CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France) Joost Breuker (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) Pompeu Casanovas (Institut de Dret i Tecnologia, UAB, Barcelona, Spain) Alessandro Lenci (Dipartimento di Linguistica, Università di Pisa, Italy) Leonardo Lesmo (Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Torino, Italy) Manfred Pinkal (Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Germany) Vito Pirrelli (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of CNR, Pisa, Italy) Paulo Quaresma (Universidade de �?vora, Portugal) Erich Schweighofer (Universität Wien, Rechtswissenschaftliche Fakultät, Wien, Austria) Tom van Engers (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) Maria A. Wimmer (Institute for Information Systems, Koblenz University, Germany) Radboud Winkels (Leibniz Center for Law, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP