ICAIL 2013 - Call for papers

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Under the Auspices of the Senate of the Italian Republic

14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Law
(ICAIL 2013)
June 10-June 14, 2013
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
(National Research Council of Italy)
http://icail2013.ittig.cnr.it

Sponsored by:

The International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL)
ITTIG-CNR (Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the CNR)

Call for Papers, Workshops and Demonstrations

The field of AI and Law is concerned with:

• the study of legal reasoning using computational methods
• the study of AI and other advanced information technologies, using law as an example domain
• formal models of norms, normative systems, norm-governed societies
• legal and quasi-legal applications of AI and other advanced information technologies

The ICAIL conference is the primary international conference addressing research in Artificial Intelligence and Law, and has been organized biennially since 1987 under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL). ICAIL provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest research results and practical applications; it fosters interdisciplinary and international collaboration. The conference proceedings are published by ACM. The journal Artificial Intelligence and Law regularly publishes expanded versions of selected ICAIL papers.

ICAIL 2013, the fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, invites the submission of papers on a broad spectrum of research topics. 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
• Automatic legal text classification and summarization
• Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
• Machine learning and data mining applied to legal databases
• Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
• E-discovery and e-disclosure
• E-government and e-justice
• Computational models of evidential reasoning
• Modeling norms for multi-agent systems
• Modeling negotiation and contract formation
• Computational models of case-based legal reasoning
• Online dispute resolution
• Intelligent legal tutoring systems
• Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
• Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems

Two tracks: regular papers and innovative applications papers

For ICAIL 2013, authors are invited to submit papers in one of two tracks: regular and innovative applications.  In addition to papers about results and findings from systems, approaches, or theoretical models (in the conference's regular track), we encourage the submission of original papers about innovative applications. Both regular track papers and innovative applications papers will be assessed in a rigorous reviewing procedure. Standard assessment criteria for research papers will apply to all submissions (relevance, originality, significance, technical quality, evaluation, presentation). 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 innovative 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.

Demonstrations

A session will be organized for the demonstration of creative, robust and practical working applications and tools. Where a demonstration is not connected to a paper in a track, a two-page extended abstract about the system should be submitted for review by the paper submission deadline via the conference management system and following the conference style. Accepted extended abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings. For those demonstrations that are connected to a paper in the regular track or innovative applications track, no separate statement about the demonstration should be submitted.

ICAIL Workshops and Tutorials

ICAIL 2013 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 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 2013
• The intended audience, including the research 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’ backgrounds in the proposed topic; and complete addresses including web pages of all organizers and committee members (if applicable).

Mentoring Program for ICAIL 2013

The International Association for AI and Law (IAAIL) will offer a mentoring program for papers being submitted to ICAIL.  The 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. If you would like help with your submission, you may ask for a mentor: a person who will help you with your submission to the IAAIL audience through one-on-one advising, usually via e-mail. To request a mentor, please send email to Jack Conrad at Jack.G.Conrad@ThomsonReuters.com by the Mentoring program request deadline. Please include your name and the names of your co-authors; the name of your school/department and institution; a plain-text description of your work (a title and abstract is a minimum requirement); and any specific questions or areas in which you would like help.  For further details about the mentoring program, see http://icail2013.ittig.cnr.it/index.php/authormentoring

Important Dates

These dates are tentative and subject to change

• Mentoring program request deadline: November 12, 2012 (revised)
• Mentoring program paper deadline: November 19, 2012 (revised)
• Submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 7, 2012
• Submission of abstracts (optional): January 11, 2013
• Submission of papers deadline: January 18, 2013
• Notification of acceptance: March 20, 2013
• Final revised and formatted papers due: April 19, 2013
• Conference: June 10 - June 14, 2013

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 athttp://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. Papers should be submitted electronically to the conference support system, https://www.conftool.net/icail2013/, in PDF or MS Word format, by the paper submission deadline.

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

Both papers and abstracts should be submitted electronically to the conference support system.

Authors will be notified of the referees' decision in March 2013. 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 2013.

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 2013. 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
Bart Verheij
Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen
b.verheij@ai.rug.nl

Conference Chair
Enrico Francesconi
ITTIG - CNR, Florence
francesconi@ittig.cnr.it

Secretary/Treasurer
Anne Gardner
Atherton, California, USA
gardner@cs.stanford.edu