he 13th International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL 2011) will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, June 6-10, 2011, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL), an organization devoted to promoting research and development in the field of AI and Law with members throughout the world.

The field of AI and Law is concerned with the study of legal reasoning using computational methods; computational models of argumentation; knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining; and the formal representation of norms, normative actions, normative systems, norm-governed societies, and multi-agent systems. The field also includes the investigation of techniques from advanced information technology, using law as the illustrative domain; and applications of advanced information technology to support tasks in the legal domain.

ICAIL provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest research results and practical applications and stimulates interdisciplinary and international collaboration. Previous ICAIL conferences have been held biennially since 1987, with proceedings published by ACM. The journal Artificial Intelligence and Law regularly publishes expanded versions of selected ICAIL papers.

Authors are invited to submit papers on topics including but not restricted to

* Formal and computational models of legal reasoning
* Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing and data mining
* Computational models of argumentation and decision making
* Legal knowledge representation including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge
* Computational models of evidential reasoning
* Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
* Modeling negotiation and contract formation
* Computational models of case-based legal reasoning
* Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
* Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
* Intelligent legal tutoring systems
* Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
* E-discovery and e-disclosure
* Automatic legal text classification and summarization
* Machine learning and data mining applied to legal databases

Papers proposing formal or computational models should provide examples and/or simulations that show the models’ applicability to a realistic legal problem or domain. Papers on applications should describe clearly the motivations behind the project, the techniques employed, and the current state of both implementation and evaluation. All papers should make clear their relation to prior work.
ICAIL Workshops and Tutorials

ICAIL 2011 will include workshops and tutorials on the first and last days. Proposals for workshops and tutorials are invited, and should be sent to the Program Chair. Tutorials should cover a broad topic of relevance to the AI and Law community. Proposals should contain enough information to permit evaluation on the basis of importance, quality, and community interest. Each workshop should have one or more designated organizers and a program or organizing committee. Proposals should be about 2 to 4 pages and include at least the following information

* The workshop or tutorial topic and goals, their significance, and their appropriateness for ICAIL 2011
* The intended audience, including the areas from which participants may come, the likely number of participants (with some of their names, if known), and plans for publicizing the workshop
* Organization of the workshop or tutorial, including the intended format (such as invited talks, presentations, panel discussions, or other methods for ensuring an interactive atmosphere) and the expected length (full day or half day)
* Organizers’ details: a description of the main organizers’ background in the proposed topic; and complete addresses including web pages of all organizers and committee members (if applicable).

Mentoring Program for ICAIL 2011

The International Association for AI and Law will offer a mentoring program for papers being submitted to the ICAIL conference. The mentoring program is intended primarily for junior authors who have not previously published an Artificial Intelligence and Law paper at a conference or in a journal.
Important Dates

These dates are tentative and subject to change

* Mentoring program request deadline: November 8, 2010
* Mentoring program paper deadline: November 15, 2010
* Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 6, 2010
* Submission of abstracts (optional): January 3, 2011
* Submission of papers deadline: January 10, 2011
* Notification of acceptance: tba
* Final revised and formatted papers due: tba
* Conference: June 6 - June 10, 2011

Submission Details

Papers should not exceed 5000 words. If an approved style file is used, the maximum length is 10 pages. Style format template files can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. Papers should be submitted by the above paper submission deadline, in PDF or MS Word format.

To aid the reviewing process, authors are requested to submit abstracts of their papers by the above abstract submission deadline. Abstracts should include at least the title of the paper, up to four keywords, and a contact address for the author.

Both papers and abstracts should be submitted electronically to the conference support system (details to be announced).

Authors will be notified of the referees’ decision in March 2011. Papers not accepted for full publication and presentation may be accepted as short research abstracts. Papers (including research abstracts) must be presented at the conference in order to appear in the proceedings. Final versions of papers for publication in the proceedings will be due in April 2011.
Donald H. Berman Award for Best Student Paper

To encourage participation by students, IAAIL has created the Donald H. Berman Award for the best paper submitted to ICAIL by a student or students. The award consists of a cash gift and free attendance at ICAIL 2011. For a paper to be considered for the award, the student author(s) should be clearly designated as such when the paper is submitted, and any nonstudent co-authors should provide a statement that the paper is primarily student work. Notification will be made through the ICAIL website, and the award will be presented at the conference banquet.
Conference Officials
Program Chair

Tom van Engers
University of Amsterdam/Faculty of Law
Leibniz Center for Law
www.LeibnizCenter.org
vanEngers@uva.nl
Conference Chair

Kevin D. Ashley
Professor of Law and Intelligent Systems
University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Ashley@pitt.edu
Secretary/Treasurer

Anne Gardner
Atherton, California, USA
gardner.anne@sbcglobal.net