Legal reasoning with argumentation schemes

ABSTRACT

Legal reasoning typically requires a variety of argumentation schemes to be used together. A legal case may raise issues requiring argument from precedent cases, rules, policy goals, moral principles, jurisprudential doctrine, social values and evidence. We present an extensible software architecture which allows diverse computational models of argumentation schemes to be used together in an integrated way to construct and search for arguments. The architecture has been implemented in Carneades, a software library for building argumentation tools. The architecture is illustrated with models of schemes for argument from ontologies, rules, cases and testimonial evidence and compared to blackboard systems for hybrid reasoning.

REFERENCES

• 1: F. Abate and E. J. Jewell, editors. New Oxford American Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 2001.
• 2: Vincent A. W. M. M. Aleven, Teaching case-based argumentation through a model and examples, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 1997
• 3: Kevin D. Ashley, Modeling Legal Arguments: Reasoning with Cases and Hypotheticals, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991
• 4: Franz Baader , Diego Calvanese , Deborah L. McGuinness , Daniele Nardi , Peter F. Patel-Schneider, The description logic handbook: theory, implementation, and applications, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2003
• 5: T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, and O. Lassila. The semantic web. Scientific American, 284(5): 34--43, May 2001.
• 6: Floris Bex , Henry Prakken , Chris Reed , Douglas Walton, Towards a formal account of reasoning about evidence: argumentation schemes and generalisations, Artificial Intelligence and Law, v.11 n.2-3, p.125-165, January 2003 [doi>10.1023/B:ARTI.0000046007.11806.9a]
• 7: A. Bondarenko , P. M. Dung , R. A. Kowalski , F. Toni, An abstract, argumentation-theoretic approach to default reasoning, Artificial Intelligence, v.93 n.1-2, p.63-101, June 1997 [doi>10.1016/S0004-3702(97)00015-5]
• 8: L. K. Branting. Reasoning with Rules and Precedents: A Computational Model of Legal Analysis. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2000. Book version of 1991 PhD Thesis.
• 9: K. L. Clark, Negation as failure, Readings in nonmonotonic reasoning, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1987
• 10: Johan de Kleer, An assumption-based TMS, Artificial Intelligence, v.28 n.2, p.127-162, March 1986 [doi>10.1016/0004-3702(86)90080-9]
• 11: J. Doyle. A truth maintenance system. Artificial Intelligence, 12: 231--272, 1979.
• 12: Phan Minh Dung, On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming and n-person games, Artificial Intelligence, v.77 n.2, p.321-357, Sept. 1995 [doi>10.1016/0004-3702(94)00041-X]
• 13: Lee D. Erman , Frederick Hayes-Roth , Victor R. Lesser , D. Raj Reddy, The Hearsay-II Speech-Understanding System: Integrating Knowledge to Resolve Uncertainty, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.12 n.2, p.213-253, June 1980 [doi>10.1145/356810.356816]
• 14: Anne von der Lieth Gardner, An artificial intelligence approach to legal reasoning, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987
• 15: Thomas F. Gordon, Pleadings Game: An Artificial Intelligence Model of Procedural Justice, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, 1995
• 16: T. F. Gordon. Hybrid reasoning with argumentation schemes. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA 08), pages 16--25, Patras, Greece, July 2008. The 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2008).
• 17: Thomas F. Gordon , Henry Prakken , Douglas Walton, The Carneades model of argument and burden of proof, Artificial Intelligence, v.171 n.10-15, p.875-896, July, 2007 [doi>10.1016/j.artint.2007.04.010]
• 18: Guido Governatori , Michael J. Maher , Grigoris Antoniou , David Billington, Argumentation Semantics for Defeasible Logic, Journal of Logic and Computation, v.14 n.5, p.675-702, October 2004 [doi>10.1093/logcom/14.5.675]
• 19: Benjamin N. Grosof , Ian Horrocks , Raphael Volz , Stefan Decker, Description logic programs: combining logic programs with description logic, Proceedings of the 12th international conference on World Wide Web, May 20-24, 2003, Budapest, Hungary [doi>10.1145/775152.775160]
• 20: J. C. Hage. Reasoning with Rules -- An Essay on Legal Reasoning and its Underlying Logic. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1997.
• 21: J. D. Mackenzie. Question-begging in non-cumulative systems. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8: 117--133, 1979.
• 22: F. Manola and E. Miller. RDF primer, 2004.
• 23: D. L. McGuinness and F. van Harmelen. OWL Web Ontology Language overview. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/, 2004.
• 24: Donald Nute, Defeasible logic, Handbook of logic in artificial intelligence and logic programming (vol. 3): nonmonotonic reasoning and uncertain reasoning, Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, NY, 1994
• 25: J. Pollock. Defeasible reasoning. Cognitive Science, 11(4): 481--518, 1987.
• 26: Henry Prakken, Combining Modes of Reasoning: An Application of Abstract Argumentation, Proceedings of the 11th European conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence, September 28-October 01, 2008, Dresden, Germany [doi>10.1007/978-3-540-87803-2_29]
• 27: H. Prakken and G. Sartor. A dialectical model of assessing conflicting argument in legal reasoning. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 4(3--4): 331--368, 1996.
• 28: H. Prakken and G. Sartor. Modelling reasoning with precedents in a formal dialogue game. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 6(2--4): 231--287, 1998.
• 29: Iyad Rahwan , Bita Banihashemi, Arguments in OWL: A Progress Report, Proceeding of the 2008 conference on Computational Models of Argument: Proceedings of COMMA 2008, p.297-310, June 21, 2008
• 30: C. A. Reed and G. W. Rowe. Araucaria: Software for argument analysis, diagramming and representation. International Journal of AI Tools, 13(4): 961--980, 2004.
• 31: Guillermo R. Simari , Ronald P. Loui, A mathematical treatment of defeasible reasoning and its implementation, Artificial Intelligence, v.53 n.2-3, p.125-157, Feb. 1992 [doi>10.1016/0004-3702(92)90069-A]
• 32: D. B. Skalak and E. L. Rissland. Arguments and cases: An inevitable intertwining. Aritificial Intelligence and Law, 1(1): 3--45, 1992.
• 33: B. Verheij. Rules, Reasons, Arguments. Formal Studies of Argumentation and Defeat. Ph.d., Universiteit Maastricht, 1996.
• 34: Bart Verheij, Dialectical argumentation with argumentation schemes: an approach to legal logic, Artificial Intelligence and Law, v.11 n.2-3, p.167-195, January 2003 [doi>10.1023/B:ARTI.0000046008.49443.36]
• 35: R. Walker. An Expert System Architecture for Hetergeneous Domains -- A Case Study in the Legal Field. PhD thesis, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1992.
• 36: D. Walton. Legal argumentation and evidence. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 2002.
• 37: D. Walton. Fundamentals of Critical Argumentation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2006.
• 38: Adam Wyner , Trevor Bench-Capon, Argument Schemes for Legal Case-based Reasoning, Proceeding of the 2007 conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems: JURIX 2007: The Twentieth Annual Conference, p.139-149, June 15, 2007

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.1 Applications and Expert Systems
          Subjects: Law

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.3 Deduction and Theorem Proving

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.5 LEGAL ASPECTS OF COMPUTING
      K.5.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Legal Aspects, Theory