Papers by Trevor Bench-Capon
Most recent work on reasoning with cases in law has taken the style of rea- soning used in the CA... more Most recent work on reasoning with cases in law has taken the style of rea- soning used in the CATO system as its model, and uses the notion of factors, as found in that system. Fundamental to CATO, a successor the HYPO system, were factors, which are closely related to HYPO-style dimensions. In this paper, we will argue that the simplification involved in using factors, while it has proved pragmatically useful both for clarifying understanding of certain aspects of reasoning with cases and for implementation, causes problems with domain analysis and precludes certain kinds of argument that we would wish to model. We therefore believe that the time is now ripe to go back to the original notion of dimensions, while retaining the insights that have been gained from working with the simpler notion of factors. The paper uses two case studies to argue that this is so.
This paper describes the KRAFT architecture which supports the fusion of knowledgefrom multiple, ... more This paper describes the KRAFT architecture which supports the fusion of knowledgefrom multiple, distributed, heterogeneous sources. The architecture usesconstraints as a common knowledge interchange format, expressed against a commonontology. Knowledge held in local sources can be tranformed into the commonconstraint language, and fused with knowledge from other sources. Thefused knowledge is then used to solve some problem or deliver some informationto a user. Problem-solving in KRAFT typically exploits pre- ...
Knowledge-based systems and legal applications, 1991
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the advantages and opportunities of the Demonstrator pro... more Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the advantages and opportunities of the Demonstrator project, but the size of the project did have some negative influences as well. The chief feature that distinguished the Demonstrator project from anything that had previously been attempted in this area was its sheer size, in terms both of its duration and of the number of people involved. Because it lasted for a long time—five years as against the two or three years that is the more typical duration for such a project—it was possible to have a very substantial initial period of exploration before commencing to develop the final demonstration systems. The primary advantage of this was that design commitments could be deferred. There was no pressure to adopt an existing model for the systems as would be the case were it necessary to produce a demonstrable system in a shorter time, so that the needs of the applications could be determined and taken fully into account in the design of the systems.
Information and Communications Technology Law, Jun 1, 1999
Large legal texts are often difficult to understand, and to extract the required information from... more Large legal texts are often difficult to understand, and to extract the required information from. One particular problem is that the user typically requires only a specific, limited part of the content. In this paper we discuss how such documents can be customized on the basis of user supplied information. Customizations include the suppression of text elements, the organization of text, highlighting certain text elements, and the provision of individual links to other parts of the text, or to external texts. The result is a system which ...
Artificial Intelligence and Law, Dec 22, 2000
The avowed topic of this book is information retrieval (IR), although, as we shall see, it is als... more The avowed topic of this book is information retrieval (IR), although, as we shall see, it is also highly relevant to support for document drafting. The IR motivation is obvious. When confronted with a legal problem one believes that somewhere among the statutes, judicial decisions and literature, there is the information which one requires to solve the problem, if only it can be found. Traditionally IR is carried out by boolean keyword searching, which returns a list of documents, assessed by the measures of “relevance”–the percentage of ...
In this report we discuss the typology of dialogues given by Walton and Krabbeand offer a precise... more In this report we discuss the typology of dialogues given by Walton and Krabbeand offer a precise interpretation of them. We go on to discuss one of these dialoguetypes-persuasion-in the context of practical reasoning and the problemsassociated with such reasoning. We propose a perspective on practical reasoningas presumptive justification and critical questions, giving an extension to the accountproposed by Walton [24]. This provides us with a foundation for a protocol, named PARMA, for a dialogue game based on this theory. We ...
In this paper we describe an approach which can attempt to give a quanti- tative measure of the c... more In this paper we describe an approach which can attempt to give a quanti- tative measure of the coherence of legal theories. Starting from the notion of a theory as described in (3), we show how some ideas of Thagard can be adapted to give a measure of how coherent such a theory is. Some experiments, using the wild animals domain and theories concerning it discussed in (3) are described. We then identify some issues, both of detail and principle, that are raised by this work.
As organizations move towards decentralized control structures, software has evolved to facilitat... more As organizations move towards decentralized control structures, software has evolved to facilitate this new style of working. Such software includes conferencing systems (Kerr et al. 1982, Flores et al. 1988), bulletin boards (Payes et al. 1987) and electronic mail collectively referred to as groupware (Greenberg 1991). Groupware offers many benefits:
A Knowledge-Based System (KBS) that is not to become rapidly obsolete must change and develop wit... more A Knowledge-Based System (KBS) that is not to become rapidly obsolete must change and develop with the system. This book addresses this area of maintenance, emphasizing the specific maintenance tasks required by a KBS.
In this paper we discuss how a computational version of argumentation involving practical reasoni... more In this paper we discuss how a computational version of argumentation involving practical reasoning can be applied to the domain of e-democracy. We discuss our previous work which proposed an argument scheme and associated critical questions to make use of presumptive reasoning in order to justify a proposal for action. We explain how this proposal can be made computational for use by BDI agents and we illustrate the approach with an example application of a recent political debate involving the Government's justification of a proposed action. We then go on to discuss some interesting issues arising from the example regarding the strength of the arguments and how they can be accrued to put forward a more convincing case for justifying the action. We also examine how this application compares with a previously implemented system which makes use of the same underlying theory.
AI Communications
Certain problems associated with knowledge acquisition are identified and examined in this paper.... more Certain problems associated with knowledge acquisition are identified and examined in this paper. We review a variety of methodologies and tools designed to address these problems and then argue that there is a strong case for a preliminary knowledge analysis or domain phase of KBS development. This phase facilitates subsequent design, development and maintenance phases. The details of our domain characterisation are not expounded upon in this paper. The paper concludes with a suggestion of a re-examination of some of the ...
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998
Recently there have been proposals for sophisticated informations systems which require a number ... more Recently there have been proposals for sophisticated informations systems which require a number of information sources to communicate with each other autonomously. In this paper we discuss how such interactions might be specified, using performatives specified in terms of preconditions, postconditions and completion conditions, identified with respect to conversation classes. Pull specification requires additional conditions deriving from the policies and strategies of particular agents. The result is an approach to the specification ...
12th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications, 2000
Abstract The author reflects on the notion of an ideal audience and its implications for artifici... more Abstract The author reflects on the notion of an ideal audience and its implications for artificial intelligence (AI) and law. After introducing the notion, he considers how it can be used as an analytical tool for thinking about AI and law systems and the practice of AI and law
[1993] Proceedings International Conference on Intelligent and Cooperative Information Systems, 1993
An architechmad spec$cation of independent communicating agents is described Such agents am desig... more An architechmad spec$cation of independent communicating agents is described Such agents am designed for use in an environment which is most suitably represented as a graph or network and an m p l e of one such envinuzment is given based on the structured document graph pamdigm. The specifications extend agent architecnves in a natuml way so that the comphities fmnd in dstributed systems may be addressed Such an approach has a number of advantages; it proviaks a general repmentation paradigm that can be used as a basis in a wide range of intelligent disbibuted systems and is easily customised to cope with problems requiring graphs with differing structures and with different node and edge properties and attributes. A suitable platfomz to build agents and environments and an example of cooperative communication using dalogue analysis is presented.
In this paper we use an approach to modelling reasoning in a simple scenario from experimental ec... more In this paper we use an approach to modelling reasoning in a simple scenario from experimental economics, called the Dictator Game, using preferences over social values to provide transparent justification of actions. Our approach to decision making here does not require estimation of utilities and weights for different factors and can thus allow preferences to emerge from the reasoning. Using this model we can explain the behaviour of subjects in such experiments, and, in particular, gain insight into the framing effect observed by some experimenters, which is difficult to explain in terms of maximising expected utilities.
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Papers by Trevor Bench-Capon
logic program must take the form of an argument, rather
than a proof. This can only be done on the basis of
information regarding the role of the various literals
in the bodies of the clauses, which is normally not
captured by such programs. A schema for arguments,
derived from Toulmin, is presented, and the components
of this schema are related to the roles of literals in the
bodies of clauses. A metainterpreter is described that
uses annotations of body literals to build up an argument
structure according to this schema. This structure can
then be used to present the argument in a variety of
ways; this is illustrated by a discussion of how the
argument structure can be used as the basis of a presentation
as a paragraph of text. A simple example from a
quasilegal domain is presented.