Impressions of ICAIL 2007

ACM/AAAI 11th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2007) was held in Stanford Law School, it had around 110 participants and surprisingly there where zero (!) gaps in the programm, that is - even if a participant could not make it, some substitude speaker was sent from the department. Another thing was having a single session (no parallel sessions!) so the conference had no conveyer-taste attached to it. Everybody got perfect attention and a decent discussion after a presentation.

Some highlights:

• Tutorial "Advanced Legal Technology in Practice: An Overview" by Marc Lauritsen;
• Workshop "DESI: Supporting search and sensemaking for electronically stored information in discovery proceedings"
• Dinner with an invited lecture from philosopher John Perry, who besides touching several interesting daily politics questions from untypical angles also laid out several tips for AI researchers for the next 15 years: after already "spoiling" departments of philosophy and psychology, AI researchers should next attack departments of sociology and history, forcing them to use some formalisms, objective measurements, mathematical models, relationship references etc. His main wish was to force historians to stop writing "soft science" essays with some formal frameworks to describe facts and events.*
• Workshop on Semantic Web, that couldn't escape from the classical ontology vs taxonomy discussion ;-)
  

Some thoughts/remarks I made (in general):

• Expert systems (!) should have a new breathing in public administration sector;
• NLP (natural language processing) was a popular topic - people were working with finding arguments from (natural language) text, visualizing, concept search and domain-specific (e.g. medicine) automatic tagging in the texts.
• Sentiment analysis seems promising;
• Legal ontologies are and will remain a hard topic for a long time;
• Even bigger datasets than in classical data mining conferences (1 terabyte should be processed (clustered, deduplicated and automatically tagged) in 5..8 hours);
• In my opinion all countries in EU should transform their public legal text/search systems to MetaLex. Efforts for reinventing the same wheel are pointless.
  

* I would personally suggest everyone interesting in this idea to read the following book: Mathematics in the Archaeological and Historical Sciences by F. R. Hodson, D. G. Kendall, P. Tautu - reading it at the moment myself and I can definitely recommend it.