MIREL · MIning and REasoning with Legal texts

MIREL - MIning and REasoning with Legal texts

The project MIREL aimed at bridging the gap between the communities working in Mining and Reasoning on legal texts, which previously have mostly worked in isolation. Although current technologies provide valid solutions to help navigate legislation, their overall usefulness is limited due to their focus on terminological issues while disregarding the specific semantic aspects of law, which allows legal reasoning. MIREL was proposed to promote mobility and staff exchange in order to create an inter-continental inter-disciplinary consortium in Law and AI areas including Natural Language Processing, Computational Ontologies, Argumentation, and Logic & Reasoning. Legal Informatics is growing also at the commercial level, as witnessed that MIREL included three industrial partners in the legal tech. The project was structured in four main work packages and lasted four years, from 1.1.2016 until 31.12.2019. Travels were mostly devoted to import competences traditionally lacking in Europe. In particular, researchers from UNLP who visited UNIBO brought their expertise in legal theory to strengthen theoretical foundations of machine-readable formats to represent legal texts, researchers from UNS who visited European universities, as well as the researchers from Europe who visited ROIS, Data61 (NICTA), and ZJU jointly developed novel frameworks and solutions for argumentation, both at the theoretical level (WP1), in argumentation mining (WP2), and as an tool for reasoning on legal texts (WP3); researchers from UL, UNIBO, and UNITO who visited Stanford University, had the possibility to acquire competences needed to design and implement novel instruments such as the Privacy Ontology, the DAPRECO knowledge base, and various NLP software modules to extract data from legal texts (WP2). Finally, UCT contributed to the research in description logic for reasoning about legal ontologies, with HUD and UL in particular (WP3). Concerning use cases (WP4), INRIA and Cordoba extended former tools for processing licenses, contracts, technical documents, and multi-lingual corpora of norms, while evaluating them on data made available by Nomotika SRL in particular. Furthermore, Nomotika SRL developed a demo in Semantic Media Wiki (SMW) of the legal document management system MenslegiS, looking for a new version of MenslegiS that may reduce manual work; however, the final evaluation revealed that the SMW demo still requires lot of manual work to update the knowledge bases. On the other hand, APIS used its travels to UNITO in order to train their programmers on novel NLP techniques that were later used within their services. Finally, DLVSystem worked closely with HUD, UNS, and Data61 (NICTA) on Answer Set Programming, while extending and refining their software suite to process legal documents.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union