Preface


The First International Workshop “RELATED - Relations in the Legal Domain”
was held in conjunction with ICAIL 2021, São Paulo, Brazil, Virtual Conference,
on June 25, 2021.
This workshop focuses on relations in the legal field from different perspectives
bringing together several sub-disciplines of AI & Law – ontologies, logic,
argumentation and network analysis. The main topics includes: identification of
relational patterns in legal documents; relation classification; identification of legal
semantic roles and extraction of named entities; detection of networks of implicit
and explicit links between norms; modeling legal networks, population, enrichment
and alignment of legal ontologies; legal topic modelling and relations between
topics; emerging applications in legal data & knowledge engineering.
The challenging task of automatically identifying relations between concepts
expressed in textual documents has traditionally been addressed by NLP techniques.
Once such relations are identified in the text, they can be formalized to become part
of ontological models in a certain legal domain of interest. The extraction of
relations between legal concepts and entities is even more pertinent when
considering the increasing relevance of knowledge graphs.
Navigating the interplay between legal text fragments beyond terms, such as
normative provisions, principles, policies, arguments, is a challenging aspect of
legal reasoning. There is a rich theoretical literature on relations between norms,
principles and factors. Moreover, recent years have seen important developments in
the field of network analysis, particularly the identification, classification and
weighting of legal citations in order to build a network of related legal sources and
rank their individual importance. Another issue concerns the development of
systems for automated identification of implicit relations between norms in terms
of, for instance, conceptual similarity, motivation and conflict. Also of relevance to
this workshop are topic networks, which can be useful not only for semantic
grouping of legal text fragments, but also in comparing different legal documents,
such as legislative texts, judgments, national strategy documents, guidelines issued
by institutional bodies, and policy documents issued by companies.

The programme of the first edition of the RELATED Workshop included oral
presentations of seven papers accepted at the end of a peer-reviewed process, and an
invited talk by Bernhard Waltl (Liquid Legal Institute), titled “Networks, Relations,
Communities and the question ‘how do we want to continue?”. We thank all the
contributing speakers, the members of our Program Committee for timely providing
their reviews despite the difficulties arisen in these times of Covid-19 global
emergency, and the ICAIL Program and Conference chairs Adam Zachary Wyner
and Juliano MaranhSão for their support.

June 2020,

        Emilio Sulis, Llio Humphreys, Valentina Leone, Ilaria Angela Amantea
Workshop Organizers
Emilio SULIS, University of Turin - Computer Science Department (Italy)
Llio HUMPHREYS, University of Turin - Computer Science Department (Italy)
Ilaria Angela AMANTEA, University of Bologna - CIRSFID (Italy)
Valentina LEONE, University of Bologna - CIRSFID (Italy)


Program Committee
Valerio BASILE (University of Turin, Italy)
Guido BOELLA (University of Turin, Italy)
Silvano COLOMBO TOSATTO (CSIRO, Australia)
Luigi DI CARO (University of Turin, Italy)
Harshvardhan J. PANDIT (Trinity College, Dublin)
Rohan NANDA (University of Maastricht, Netherlands)
Livio ROBALDO (Swansea University, Wales)
Cristiana SANTOS (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
Giovanni SIRAGUSA (University of Turin, Italy)
Andrea TAGARELLI (University of Calabria, Italy)

Workshop Website
Further information on the topics, schedule, and further developments of the
RELATED Workshop can be found at the website: https://related.di.unito.it/