Preface



    Legal scholars and practitioners are feeling increasingly overwhelmed with the expand-
ing set of legislation and case law available these days, which is assuming more and more
of an international character. For example, European legislation is estimated to be 170,000
pages long, of which over 100,000 pages have been produced in the last ten years. Fur-
thermore, legislation is available in unstructured formats, which makes it difficult for users
to cut through the information overload. As the law gets more complex, conflicting, and
ever changing, more advanced methodologies are required for analyzing, representing and
reasoning on legal knowledge.
    The management of large repositories of norms, and the semantic access and reasoning
to these norms are key challenges in Legal Informatics, which is experiencing growth in
activity, also at the industrial level. Specifically, it is necessary to address both conceptual
challenges, such as the role of legal interpretation in mining and reasoning, and computa-
tional challenges, such as the handling of big legal data, and the complexity of regulatory
compliance.
    The development of NLP techniques and semantic technologies for automatic analysis
and indexing of big data freely available on the web has created opportunities for build-
ing new approaches to improve the efficiency, comprehensibility, and consistency of legal
systems. Semantic analysis aims at relating syntactic elements – which could be phrases,
clauses, sentences, paragraphs, and whole documents – to their meanings in a given do-
main, including meanings specific to legal information. On the one hand, in recent years
the EU has delivered huge amounts of resources on EU law in many languages (such as,
EuroParl, JRC, etc.). On the other hand, the matured NLP and Semantic Web technology
provides a good inventory: for formalizing the law data in the form of domain ontologies;
for automating the process of relevant knowledge extraction from legal documents; and for
representing it in form of Linked Data in RDF. This will support legal reasoning tasks such
as better search possibilities, compliance checking and decision support, as well as a better
presentation of the legal information to professional and non-professional stakeholders.
   The aim of MIREL 2019, the fourth edition of the workshop, is to bridge the gap
between the community working on legal ontologies and NLP parsers and the community
working on reasoning methods and formal logic, towards these objectives described above.


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  bution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
    The contributions submitted to MIREL 2019 have been peer-reviewed by at least two
members of the Program Committee. The accepted papers, presented here in these Work-
shop Notes, were accepted based on their quality, relevance to the workshop topic, and
their potential to bring forward interesting ideas to be discussed at the workshop.
    Thanks to the invaluable and much appreciated contributions of the authors and the
Programme Committee, MIREL 2019 provides participants with an opportunity to posi-
tion their contributions with respect to one another. Hopefully, this will contribute to the
development of a truly interdisciplinary research-community around the different aspects
and problems of Legal Informatics.



                                           (Luxembourg, Turin, Brisbane – January 2020)
   Giovanni Casini, Luigi Di Caro, Guido Governatori, Valentina Leone, Réka Markovich