The RELATED workshop focuses on the wide-ranging topic of relations in the legal field. Typical goals in relations studies are: ranking of normative provisions and judgments; classification of implicit and explicit links between norms; handling potential or actual conflict between technical and goal-oriented norms with recourse to mechanisms such as defeasibility and balance of principles; discovery of synonyms and near-synonyms in documents from different languages and contexts (jurisdictions, document type); discovery of instances of count-as terms and policies to facilitate analogical reasoning and compliance checking. Relations are an important aspect of many sub-disciplines of AI & Law – ontologies, logic, argumentation and network analysis. This workshop is intended to be a forum bringing together all these sub-disciplines to focus on relations from different perspectives.

The challenging task of automatically identifying relations between concepts expressed in textual documents has traditionally been addressed by NLP techniques. Once such relations are identified in the text, they can be formalized to become part of ontological models in a certain legal domain of interest. The extraction of relations between legal concepts and entities is even more pertinent when considering the increasing relevance of knowledge graphs in the Semantic Web context. For instance, applications that extract relations between norms, legal concepts and documents may look at the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud for reusing, integrating and expanding existing data on the Web.

Navigating the interplay between legal text fragments beyond terms, such as normative provisions, principles, policies, arguments, is a challenging aspect of legal reasoning. There is a rich theoretical literature on relations between norms, principles and factors. Moreover, recent years have seen important developments in the field of network analysis, particularly the identification, classification and weighting of legal citations in order to build a network of related legal sources and rank their individual importance. Less explored is the development of systems for automated identification of implicit relations between norms in terms of, for instance, conceptual similarity, motivation and conflict. Also of relevance to this workshop are topic networks, which can be useful not only for semantic grouping of legal text fragments, but also in comparing different legal documents, such as legislative texts, judgments, national strategy documents, guidelines issued by institutional bodies, and policy documents issued by companies. Contributions are welcome from NLP, machine learning, logic and argumentation.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

The workshop will look for original, high quality contributions that explore the following (non-exhaustive) list of topics:

● Identification of relational patterns in legal documents
● Relation classification
● Identification of legal semantic roles and extraction of named entities
● Detection of networks of implicit and explicit links between norms
● Modeling legal networks
● Network analysis in the legal domain
● Representation of relational legal knowledge
● Automated relation extraction from legal text corpora
● Learning relations from legal network analysis
● Population, enrichment and alignment of legal ontologies
● Legal knowledge graphs in the Semantic Web
● Legal topic modelling and relations between topics
● Computational models of argumentation for legal data
● Natural language processing techniques and systems for legal documents
● Emerging applications in legal data & knowledge engineering


SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished research papers.

Papers should be written in English, following the new CEUR-ART 1-column style. An Overleaf page for LaTeX users is available at https://www.overleaf.com/read/gwhxnqcghhdt. To download an offline version with the style files: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEURART.zip. It also contains DOCX template files.

All papers must be converted to PDF prior to electronic submission. The submitted regular paper must be at least 10 pages long (excluding references), and the short paper must be between 5 to 9 pages long (excluding references).

At least one author of each accepted paper must register and participate in the workshop.

According to CEUR-WS policy, the papers will be published under a CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en) that will be included in an open-access post-proceedings volume of CEUR Workshop Proceedings (http://ceur-ws.org/), indexed by both Scopus and DBLP.

Submissions should be made via the Easychair system through the following submission page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=related2021


Workshop Organizers (in alphabetical order)

Ilaria Angela AMANTEA, University of Bologna (Italy)
Llio HUMPHREYS, University of Turin (Italy)
Valentina LEONE, University of Bologna (Italy)
Emilio SULIS, University of Turin (Italy)

Program Committee

Valerio BASILE (University of Turin, Italy)
Guido BOELLA (University of Turin, Italy)
Silvano COLOMBO TOSATTO (CSIRO, Australia)
Luigi DI CARO (University of Turin, Italy)
Harshvardhan J. PANDIT (Trinity College, Dublin)
Rohan NANDA (University of Maastricht, Netherlands)
Livio ROBALDO (Swansea University, Wales)
Cristiana SANTOS (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
Giovanni SIRAGUSA (University of Turin, Italy)
Andrea TAGARELLI (University of Calabria, Italy)