johnz@latcs1.lat.oz.au (John Zeleznikow) (05/22/91)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND LAW - COURSE/WORKSHOP
Lecturer: Professor Donald H Berman
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts
Venue: La Trobe University
Time: All afternoons during two weeks July 8 -19 1991
This course will involve designing and constructing legal information systems
that provide intelligent advice. No prior knowledge is assumed.
The course will consist of lectures, tutorials, laboratories and supervised
practical work.
Professor Berman is currently Richardson Professor of Law and the director of
the Center for the Study of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University
in Boston Massachusetts. He is editor of the Journal "Artificial Intelligence
and Law" and has been a key-note speaker at the International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence and Law.
Professor Berman will be supported by Dr. John Zeleznikow and Mr. George Vossos
who have developed the IKBALS II Prototye. IKBALS II adds reasoning with
precents into an object-oriented rule-based system which advises on the
likelihood of successful claims under the Accident Compensation (Workcare) Act.
The fee for the course is $950 ($495 for academic staff and $95 for students and
unemployed people), and includes all use of software and hardware, written
materials and meals and refreshments.
For further information and registration forms contact:
Dr. John Zeleznikow
IKBALS Project
Database Research Laboratory
Applied Computing Research Institute
La Trobe University
Bundoora Victoria 3083 Australia
Phone: 61.3.4791003
FAX: 61.3.4704915
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COURSE OUTLINE
Seminar on Artificial Intelligence and Law
Professor Donald H. Berman
Richardson Professor of Law
Northeastern University School of Law
Co-director Northeastern University Center for Law & Computer
Science
July, 1991
I. INTRODUCTION
This course investigates two questions: 1) what is the impact of
artificial intelligence (AI) on the legal profession and the legal
system? 2) what is "legal reasoning" and how can it be represented in
a form understandable by a computer.
For computer science students interested in AI this course will
provide insight and experience in modeling judgmental reasoning
in a complex domain. For those interested in law this course enhances
traditional lawyering skills by analyzing the lawyering process
through the magnifying lens of AI. For both lawyers and computer
scientists this course will offer the opportunity to explore methods
for the more efficient delivery of legal services while providing
the intellectual challenge of trying to develop formal models that
explain how the legal systems works both in theory and practice.
II. SUBJECTS COVERED
A. A Historical and Conceptual Overview of AI & LAW.
B. Basic Knowledge Representation.
1. Statutory Normalization - removing syntactic ambiguity
from legal documents by use of logical formalisms.
2. Production Rules - The use of logical formalisms to
represent legal rules.
3. The potential and limitations of logical models of legal
rules.
C. Working with cases I -
1. Extracting deep structure rules from cases.
2. Inducing rules from cases by computational means -
the ID3 algorithm.
D. Working with case II.
1. The use of frames and semantic nets.
2. Dimensions and the HYPO project.
3. Prototypes and Deformations.
E. Predictive and Normative Expert Systems - What can
Legal expert systems safely do?
F. Conceptual Retrieval - Going beyond the constraints imposed
by full text retrieval using boolean logic.
G. Intelligent Document Assembly - How computer science can
safely achieve enormous efficiencies in the here and now.