Calls

Call for papers

The conference will be held ONLINE

The conference will feature a main track for technical papers, a demonstration track, workshops, tutorials, a doctoral consortium and best paper prizes.

Artificial Intelligence and Law is a vibrant research field that focuses on:

  • Legal reasoning and development of computational methods of such reasoning
  • Applications of AI and other advanced information technologies to support the legal domain
  • Discovery of electronically stored information for legal applications (eDiscovery)
  • Machine learning and data mining for legal applications
  • Formal models of norms, normative systems, and norm-governed societies

Since 1987, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL) has been the foremost international conference addressing research in Artificial Intelligence and Law. It is organized biennially under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL), and in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The conference proceedings are published by ACM.

We invite submissions of papers, technology demonstrations, as well as proposals for workshops and tutorials.

Important Dates

  • Deadline for request to take part in mentoring program: November 9, 2020
  • Deadline for submission of workshop and tutorial proposals: December 14, 2020
  • Deadline for submission of papers & demonstrations: March 1, 2021
  • Notification of acceptance: April 12, 2021
  • Deadline for submissions of camera-ready versions of accepted papers: May 10, 2021
  • Conference: June 21-25, 2021

Deadline for submission of papers

March 01, 2021

Notification of acceptance

April 12, 2021

Conference

June, 21-25, 2021

Details about the topics of relevance to the conference, and instructions for submitting papers are given below.

 

Topics

We invite submission of original papers on Artificial Intelligence & Law, covering foundations, methods, tools, systems and applications. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Argument mining from legal texts
  • Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
  • Automatic legal text classification and summarization
  • Computational methods for negotiation and contract formation
  • Computer-assisted dispute resolution
  • Deep learning applied to the legal domain
  • Deontic logics for legal reasoning
  • Distributed ledger applied in the legal domain, e.g, smart contracts, document identification, etc.
  • e-discovery and e-disclosure
  • e-government, e-democracy and e-justice
  • Ethical and legal issues of AI technology and its applications
  • Formal and computational models of evidential reasoning
  • Formal and computational models of legal reasoning (e.g. argumentation, case-based reasoning)
  • Intelligent legal tutoring systems
  • Intelligent support systems for law and forensics
  • Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems
  • Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing, argument and data mining
  • Legal design
  • Legal knowledge visualisation
  • Machine learning and data analytics applied to the legal domain
  • Modelling norms and norm-governed systems
  • Ontologies and legal knowledge representation
  • Open and linked data in the legal domain

ICAIL is keen to broaden its scope to include topics of growing importance. Therefore, we want to draw particular attention to three tracks: 

  • Innovative applications in AI and Law – applications that fall within any of the core AI & Law topics. Papers in this track will be subject to the same rigorous reviewing process as standard papers, but the emphasis is less on novel scientific contributions, formal frameworks, or results and more on the innovative and novel application of techniques from AI & Law to real problems. 
  • Ethical and legal issues of AI technology and its applications – research on legal and ethical norms for AI technology and its applications. Papers in this track will be subject to the same rigorous reviewing process as standard papers, but the emphasis is less on novel scientific contributions, formal frameworks, or results and more on legal, philosophical and social perspectives on AI. 
  • Reproducible results and data – it is essential for scientific progress that techniques and results are reproducible and scrutinised in detail. Papers in this track will be subject to the same rigorous reviewing process as standard papers, but they should report the results of work to reproduce and scrutinise three or more previously published works on a related topic (so as to make the analysis coherent and results comparable). Special effort should go to providing code (e.g., as Jupyter notebooks) and data.

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 applications should describe clearly the underlying motivations, the techniques employed, and the current state of both implementation and evaluation. All papers should make clear their relation to prior work.

 

Submission Details, including instructions for blind review

Papers (up to 10 pages inclusive of references) should present worked-out ideas on relevant topics. Papers on machine learning or data mining should include discussions of the data, methodology, results, and analysis of the results; it would be highly recommended that code (e.g., as Jupyter notebooks) and data be provided so as to foster reproducible results. Papers proposing formal or computational models should in addition provide examples and/or reproducible simulations. Papers on applications should describe the motivations, techniques, implementation, and evaluation; it would be highly recommended that code (e.g., as Jupyter notebooks) and data be provided so as to foster reproducible results. All papers should make clear their relation to legal information, reasoning, or processes as well as relation to prior work and novel scientific contribution.

Papers should not exceed the page limit in the approved style: the ACM sigconf template (for LaTeX) or the interim template layout.docx (for Word), both at  http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template

All papers should be converted to PDF prior to electronic submission. Papers that do not adhere to these conditions will be rejected.

Submissions should be uploaded in the conference support system https://www.conftool.net/icail2021/ by the paper submission deadline. For each submission, it should be indicated whether it belongs in the standard track or one of the special tracks (Innovative Applications or Ethical and Legal Issues or Reproducible results and data) using the facility provided by the submission system.

Reviewing will be double blind. Papers submitted for review should not include names and affiliations of the authors, nor an acknowledgments section. These aspects can be added at the camera-ready stage. Therefore, prior to submission of the paper, the authors should first register the paper on the conference support system in order to receive an ID number for the paper. Then, in order to submit the paper, the paper should be revised so that the ID number of the paper replaces the names and affiliations of the authors. The references should include published literature relevant to the paper, including previous works of the authors, though care should be taken in the style of writing in order to preserve anonymity.

 


Demonstrations

Deadline for demonstration submission:  March 1, 2021 

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 submitted paper, a two-page extended abstract about the system should be submitted for review, via the conference support system and following the instructions on paper submission. Accepted extended abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings. For those demonstrations that are connected to a paper in the main track, no separate statement about the demonstration need be submitted, but the author(s) should send an email to the Program Chair by the demo submission deadline to register their interest in demonstrating their work at this session.

 


Awards

IAAIL has established three different awards, to be presented at the conference banquet.

Carole Hafner ICAIL 2021 Best Paper Award

The best paper award is given in memory of Carole Hafner, an associate professor of computer science at Northeastern University. She was one of the founders of the ICAIL conference and a co-founding editor of the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Donald H. Berman Award for Best Student Paper

The best student paper award is in memory of Donald H. Berman, a professor of law at Northeastern University, who was a co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence and Law journal. The award consists of a cash gift and free attendance at ICAIL 2021. For a paper to be considered for the award, the student author(s) should be clearly designated as such when the paper is submitted using the facility provided by the submission system, and any non-student co-authors should provide a statement by email to the Program Chair that affirms that the paper is primarily student work.

Peter Jackson Award for Best Innovative Application Paper

The best innovative application paper award is dedicated to the memory of Peter Jackson, Thomson Reuters’ Chief Research Scientist, who was a strong supporter of the ICAIL conferences and a significant contributor to the development of advanced technologies in AI and Law.

RuleML/LegalRuleML paper award

Coming soon

 


Conference Officials

Program Chair

Adam Zachary Wyner
Swansea University, United Kingdom
a.z.wyner@swansea.ac.uk

Conference Chair

Juliano Maranhão
University of São Paulo, Brazil
julianomaranhao@usp.br

Secretary/Treasurer

Michał Araszkiewic
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
michal.araszkiewicz@uj.edu.pl

The 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2021) will be held at University of Sao Paulo from Monday, June 21 to Friday, June 25. The main Call for Papers can be found at: http://icail.lawgorithm.com.br/calls.

The ICAIL 2021 Tutorials and Workshops complement the main track of the conference and offer an opportunity to present late-breaking research on AI and Law results, on-going research projects, and innovative work in progress. Tutorials and Workshops aim to encourage presenters and participants to engage in research discussions; such discussions can be valuable inputs for the future work of the presenters while offering participants an effective way to broaden their knowledge of the emerging research trends, and to network with other researchers.

ICAIL 2021 plans to run workshops and tutorials on either Monday, June 21 and Friday, June 25. Proposals for workshops and tutorials are invited.

Submission information

Deadline

14 December 2020

Workshops & Tutorials

June 21 to June 25, 2021

ICAIL 2021 will include workshops and tutorials on Monday, June 21 and Friday, June 25. Tutorials should cover a broad topic of relevance to the AI and Law community and should have one or more designated organizers/speakers. A workshop is intended for informal discussion, and it should have one or more designated organizers and a program or organizing committee. Proposals should contain enough information to permit evaluation on the basis of importance, quality, and community interest. 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 2021 
  • 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’ background in the proposed topic; and complete addresses including web pages of all organizers and committee members (if applicable)

 

Review criteria

All tutorial and workshop proposals will be reviewed and selected based on relevance to the AI and Law field, potential significance, and clarity.

At least one of the organizers must be a registered participant at the conference, and be responsible for the tutorial/workshop corresponding session. ICAIL 2021 reserves the right to cancel workshops or tutorials that fail to reach a minimum number of registered participants.

Submission date and contact details

The submission deadline for workshop and tutorial proposals is December 14, 2020. Questions should be directed to Adam Zachary Wyner, Program Chair (a.z.wyner@swansea.ac.uk).

The International Association of Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL) is offering a mentoring programme for papers being submitted to its biennial ICAIL conference, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law. The programme 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 and Skype. A mentor can also familiarize you with the standards and deadlines of ICAIL submissions. Mentors are volunteers familiar with successful submissions. To request a mentor, please send email by the Mentoring Programme Request Deadline to the organiser: Michał Araszkiewicz  (michal.araszkiewicz@uj.edu.pl).

Please include:

  • Your name and the names of your co-authors;
  • The name of your school (or department) and institution;
  • A plain-text description of your work (a title and abstract is a minimum requirement);
  • Any specific questions or areas in which you would like help.

 

A mentor may be able to advise you about the most appropriate forum for your work, suggest improvements to your submission, suggest how to deal with language problems, or refer you to relevant research of which you might not have been aware. Typically, a mentor might spend 3—7 hours on a submission.

Note the following:

  • People requesting mentoring must have a draft ready for the mentor to review by the Mentoring Programme Paper Deadline;
  • If there is an experienced AI & Law-related researcher in your department, it is expected that you would approach her/him yourself;
  • No notification of mentor/mentee assignments will be made until after the Mentoring Programme Paper Deadline;
  • Reviewers will not be informed of whether a paper has been mentored. That is, the fact that a paper was mentored is not considered during the paper selection process.

 

Important Dates

Mentoring Programme Request Deadline

Monday, November 9, 2020

Send notice to Michał Araszkiewicz, michal.araszkiewicz@uj.edu.pl

Mentoring Programme Paper Deadline

Shortly after mentor assignment

Mentoring Programme Organiser

Michał Araszkiewicz (Jagiellonian University, Poland)

Doctoral Consortium

 

The ICAIL 2021 Doctoral Consortium aims at promoting the exchange of ideas from PhD reseachers in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Law, and to provide them an opportunity to interact and receive feedback from leading scholars and experts in the field. Specifically, the Consortium seeks to provide opportunities for PhD students to:

  • obtain fruitful feedback and advice on their research projects;
  • meet experts from different backgrounds working on topics related to the AI & Law and Legal Information Systems fields;
  • have a face to face mentoring discussion on the topic and methodology of the PhD with an international senior scholar;
  • discuss concerns about research, supervision, the job market, and other career-related issues.

 

To be eligible for the Consortium, a candidate must be a current doctoral student within a recognised university. Ideally, the candidate should have at least 8—12 months of work remaining before expected completion. The participants of the Doctoral Consortium must register for and attend the main conference. The PhD student should be the sole author of the submission. Note that submissions to the Doctoral Consortium are entirely separate from any papers that students may have submitted to the main conference.

The accepted thesis descriptions or research descriptions will be presented to an interested audience and subject to discussion during the ICAIL 2021 conference. We expect submissions addressing any topic related to the AI & Law discipline, including the topics listed in the call for papers for the main conference, which include but are not limited to:

  • Argument mining from legal texts 
  • Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts 
  • Automatic legal text classification and summarization 
  • Computational methods for negotiation and contract formation 
  • Computer-assisted dispute resolution 
  • Deep learning applied to the legal domain
  • Deontic logics for legal reasoning 
  • e-discovery and e-disclosure 
  • e-government, e-democracy and e-justice 
  • Ethical and legal issues of AI technology and its applications 
  • Formal and computational models of evidential reasoning 
  • Formal and computational models of legal reasoning (e.g. argumentation, case-based reasoning) 
  • Intelligent legal tutoring systems 
  • Intelligent support systems for law and forensics 
  • Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems 
  • Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing, argument, and data mining 
  • Legal design 
  • Legal knowledge visualization 
  • Machine learning and data analytics applied to the legal domain 
  • Modelling norms and norm-governed systems 
  • Ontologies and legal knowledge representation 
  • Open and linked data in the legal domain 
  • Smart contracts and application of blockchain in the legal domain

Submission

Students are invited to submit an original description of their work addressing the following aspects:

  • A clear formulation of the research question; 
  • An identification of the significant problems in the field of research; 
  • An outline of the current knowledge of the problem domain, as well as the state of existing solutions; 
  • A presentation of preliminary ideas, the proposed approach and the results achieved so far; 
  • A sketch of the applied research methodology; 
  • A description of the PhD project’s contribution to the problem solution; 
  • A discussion of how the suggested solution is different, new, or better than existing approaches to the problem.

Thesis descriptions or research outcomes are limited to 10 pages in English using LNCS format and submitted electronically in PDF format jointly with a maximum 3 page CV. Please submit to https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=icail2021dc

Submissions will be assessed by members from the AI and Law community who will consider how well the submissions address each of the aspects given above. We intend to invite the presenting authors to co-author a paper covering the topics of the accepted DC submissions in the Artificial Intelligence and Law journal. 

Important Dates

Deadline for submission of papers

April 26, 2021

Notification of acceptance

May 24, 2021

Camera-ready copy due

June 7, 2021

Conference

June 21 to June 25, 2021

Award

The Best Paper of ICAIL 2021 Doctoral Consortium Award will be assigned to the most original, innovative and well presented research.

Chairs

Michał Araszkiewicz
Jagiellonian University, Poland

Adam Zachary Wyner
Swansea University, United Kingdom

Programme ICAIL 2021 doctoral consortium

Coming soon

Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE)

 

Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE) 2021, in association with the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL) 2021

Webpage: http://www.ualberta.ca/~rabelo/COLIEE2021/

As an associated event of ICAIL 2021, we are happy to announce the 9th Competition on Legal Information Extraction and Entailment (COLIEE-2021), which will include tasks on both statute law and case law.

Four tasks are included in the 2021 edition: Tasks 1 and 2 are about case law, and tasks 3, 4 and 5(new task) are on statute law. Task 1 is a legal case retrieval task, and it involves reading a new case Q, and extracting supporting cases S1, S2…, Sn from the provided case law corpus, to support the decision for Q. Task 2 is the legal case entailment task, which involves the identification of one or more paragraphs from an existing case that entail the decision of a new case. As in previous COLIEE competitions, Task 3 is to consider a yes/no legal question Q and retrieve relevant statutes from a database of Japanese civil code statutes; Task 4 is to confirm entailment of a yes/no answer from the retrieved civil code statutes. Task 5 is to answer a yes/no question without the retrieved civil code statues.

Further details can be found in the following URL: http://www.ualberta.ca/~rabelo/COLIEE2021/

The datasets for Task 1 and Task 2 are in English, and the datasets for Task 3, Task 4 and Task 5 are available both in Japanese and English (translation from Japanese bar exams and civil code). You can choose any (or both) language datasets and any task for participation.

The intention is to build a community of practice regarding legal information processing and textual entailment, so that the adoption and adaptation of general methods from a variety of fields is considered, and that participants share their approaches, problems, and results.

We require participants to submit a paper on their method and experimental results to ICAIL 2021 in accordance with the instructions specified athttps://icail.lawgorithm.com.br and to present the paper at the COLIEE workshop in ICAIL 2021 (held online).

Accepted papers will be published at an EPiC Series in Computing. The papers authored by the competition winners will be included in the main ICAIL 2021 proceedings if COLIEE organizers admit the paper novelty after the review process.

 


Important dates:

31 Jan, 2021 Training data release
08 Feb, 2021 Test data release
15 Mar, 2021 Submission deadline of competition test runs for task 3
19 Mar, 2021 Submission deadline of competition test runs for task 5
22 Mar, 2021 Return of competition test run rankings/assessments for task 3 and announcements of answers (relevant article(s) for each question) for task 4
29 Mar, 2021 Submission deadline of competition test runs for task 1 and 2
29 Mar, 2021 Submission deadline of competition test runs for task 4 using the above answers for the same test of bar exam questions
03 Apr, 2021 Announcements of rankings/ assessments for tasks 1, 2, 4 and 5
12 Apr, 2021 Paper submission deadline for the COLIEE workshop
26 Apr, 2021 Notification for the COLIEE workshop paper
10 May, 2021 Camera-ready copy deadline
21-25 Jun, 2021 ICAIL 2021 (one day for the COLIEE workshop)


Application Details:

Potential participants to COLLIE-2021 should respond to this call for participation by submitting an application. To apply, submit the application and memorandums of the following URL to rabelo(at)ualberta.ca .

 


Application:

http://www.ualberta.ca/~rabelo/COLIEE2021/application.pdf

Memorandum for Tasks 1 and/or 2 (Case law competition) http://www.ualberta.ca/~rabelo/COLIEE2021/CL_memorandum.pdf

Memorandum for Tasks 3 and/or 4 and/or 5 (Statute law competition, English Data) http://www.ualberta.ca/~rabelo/COLIEE2021/SL_EN_memorandum.pdf

Memorandum for Tasks 3 and/or 4 and/or 5 (Statute law competition, Japanese Data) http://www.ualberta.ca/~rabelo/COLIEE2021/SL_JA_memorandum.pdf

An acknowledgement note will be sent to the email address supplied in the form once the form has been processed.


Task coordinators:

Mi-Young Kim, University of Alberta, Canada Randy Goebel, University of Alberta, Canada Juliano Rabelo, University of Alberta, Canada Ken Satoh, National Institute of Informatics, Japan Yoshinobu Kano, Shizuoka University, Japan Masaharu Yoshioka, Hokkaido University, Japan

Questions and further information:

rabelo(at)ualberta.ca

Copyright 2021 ICAIL. All rights reserved