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24 A.I. & L. 1 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/artinl24 and id is 1 raw text is: Artif Intell Law (2016) 24:1-49
DOI 10.1007/s10506-016-9178-1 rossMrk
A methodology for designing systems to reason
with legal cases using Abstract Dialectical Frameworks
Latifa Al-Abdulkarim' - Katie Atkinson'-
Trevor Bench-Capon'
Published online: 12 March 2016
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016
Abstract This paper presents a methodology to design and implement programs
intended to decide cases, described as sets of factors, according to a theory of a
particular domain based on a set of precedent cases relating to that domain. We use
Abstract Dialectical Frameworks (ADFs), a recent development in Al knowledge
representation, as the central feature of our design method. ADFs will play a role
akin to that played by Entity-Relationship models in the design of database systems.
First, we explain how the factor hierarchy of the well-known legal reasoning system
CATO can be used to instantiate an ADF for the domain of US Trade Secrets. This
is intended to demonstrate the suitability of ADFs for expressing the design of legal
cased based systems. The method is then applied to two other legal domains often
used in the literature of Al and Law. In each domain, the design is provided by the
domain analyst expressing the cases in terms of factors organised into an ADF from
which an executable program can be implemented in a straightforward way by
taking advantage of the closeness of the acceptance conditions of the ADF to
components of an executable program. We evaluate the ease of implementation, the
performance and efficacy of the resulting program, ease of refinement of the pro-
gram and the transparency of the reasoning. This evaluation suggests ways in which
® Latifa Al-Abdulkarim
latifak@liverpool.ac.uk
Katie Atkinson
Katie@liverpool.ac.uk
Trevor Bench-Capon
tbc@liverpool.ac.uk
Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Ashton Street,
Liverpool L69 3BX, UK

_ Springer

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