This is a past event
Abstract: Factor-based reasoning provides an established approach to reasoning with legal cases. Factors are stereotypical patterns of facts that are sufficiently abstract to apply to a number of cases and within a body of case law factors favour a particular side, plaintiff or defendant. In this talk I will report on work to express factor-based reasoning through a recent development from computational models of argument, Abstract Dialectical Frameworks (ADFs). ADFs can be seen as a generalisation of standard abstract Argumentation Frameworks in which nodes represent statements rather than abstract arguments and each node is associated with its own acceptance condition. I will demonstrate the suitability of ADFs for representing case law domains in terms of factors, over which automated reasoning about the outcomes of cases can take place. An implementation capturing a body of case law will be discussed, along with an evaluation of the efficacy of the program in deciding the cases represented as an ADF.
Bio: Katie Atkinson is a Reader in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool, UK. Her research concerns computational models of argument, with a particular focus on persuasive argumentation in practical reasoning and how this can be applied in domains such as law, e-democracy and agent systems. Katie holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Liverpool and she has published over one hundred articles in peer-reviewed conferences and journals within the topic of artificial intelligence and the aforementioned application areas. Katie’s work covers both theoretical and applied aspects; recent projects have concerned the development of intelligent tools for a law company, and realisation of tools to support e-democracy and legal knowledge-based systems. Katie is Vice-President of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law, and Program Chair of the fifteenth edition of the Association’s conference (ICAIL 2015) to be held in San Diego, USA, in June 2015.
- Speaker
- Katie Atkinson
- Hosted by
- Adam Wyner
- Venue
- Meston 311