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4 A.I. & L. 1 (1996)

handle is hein.journals/artinl4 and id is 1 raw text is: Artificial Intelligence and Law 4: 1-71, 1996. 1 @ 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. BankXX: Supporting Legal Arguments through Heuristic Retrieval * EDWINA L. RISSLAND, DAVID B. SKALAK and M. TIMUR FRIEDMAN Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003, U.S.A. Email: rissland@cs.umass.edu Abstract. The BankXX system models the process of perusing and gathering information for argu- ment as a heuristic best-first search for relevant cases, theories, and other domain-specific information. As BankXX searches its heterogeneous and highly interconnected network of domain knowledge, information is incrementally analyzed and amalgamated into a dozen desirable ingredients for argu- ment (called argument pieces), such as citations to cases, applications of legal theories, and references to prototypical factual scenarios. At the conclusion of the search, BankXX outputs the set of argument pieces filled with harvested material relevant to the input problem situation. This research explores the appropriateness of the search paradigm as a framework for harvesting and mining information needed to make legal arguments. In this article, we describe how legal research fits the heuristic search framework and detail how this model is used in BankXX. We describe the BankXX program with emphasis on its representation of legal knowledge and legal argument. We describe the heuristic search mechanism and evaluation functions that drive the program. We give an extended example of the processing of BankXX on the facts of an actual legal case in BankXX's application domain - the good faith question of Chapter 13 personal bankruptcy law. We discuss closely related research on legal knowledge representation and retrieval and the use of search for case retrieval or tasks related to argument creation. Finally we review what we believe are the contributions of this research to the understanding of the diverse disciplines it addresses. Key words: legal argument, heuristic search, best-first search, evaluation function, bankruptcy law, good faith, information retrieval, information harvesting, case-domain graph, argument pieces, argument dimensions, argument factors, neighbor methods Part I: The Approach 1. Introduction In this article we present our research on the problem of perusing and gather- ing information for use in legal argument. In particular, we discuss our program BankXX* and its use of the heuristic search paradigm as a computational frame- work for this information harvesting task. This research attempts to bring together a number of ideas about artificial intelli- gence and about law. Its ideas unite information retrieval, architecture and control * This research was supported in part by grant No. 90-0359 from the Air Force Office of Spon- sored Research and NSF grant No. EEC-9209623 State/University/Industry Cooperative Research on Intelligent Information Retrieval. ** We pronounce the name of this program as Bank-ex-ex.

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