Call for Papers

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 it began in 1987, the ICAIL conference has been established as 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 both the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM SIGAI). The conference proceedings are published by ACM. The journal Artificial Intelligence and Law regularly publishes expanded versions of selected ICAIL papers.

Important Dates

Deadline for submission of papers: ~~January 13th~~ January 27, 2017
Notification of acceptance: April 7th, 2017
Conference: June 12—16th, 2017

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

Topics

The field serves as an excellent setting for AI researchers to demonstrate the application of their work in a rich, real-world domain. The conference also serves as a venue for researchers to showcase their work on the theoretical foundations of computational models of law. Accordingly, authors are invited to submit papers on a broad spectrum of research topics that include, but are not restricted to:

Formal and computational models of legal reasoning, including argumentation, evidential reasoning, legal interpretation, and decision making
Knowledge acquisition techniques for the legal domain, including natural language processing, argument and data mining
Legal knowledge representation, including legal ontologies and common sense knowledge
Machine Learning applied to legal text to advance legal analytics
Automatic legal text classification and summarisation
Automated information extraction from legal databases and texts
Data mining applied to the legal domain
Conceptual or model-based legal information retrieval
E-government, e-democracy and e-justice
Legal and Ethical issues of AI and Law technology and its applications
Modelling norms and legal reasoning for multi-agent systems
Modelling negotiation and contract formation
Technical and legal aspects of smart contracts and application of blockchain technology in the legal domain
Big data and data analytics for and in the legal domain
Online dispute resolution
Intelligent legal tutoring systems
Intelligent support systems for the legal domain
Interdisciplinary applications of legal informatics methods and systems

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.

Demonstrations

A session will be organised 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 conference style. 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 be advised) to register their interest in demonstrating their work at this session.

Doctoral Consortium for ICAIL 2017

A Doctoral Consortium will be held as part of ICAIL 2017. The event will provide doctoral students with an opportunity to publish and present papers on their PhD research and to receive feedback and encouragement from the AI and Law community. Students who submit papers to the main conference are also welcome to submit their work to the Doctoral Consortium. A call for papers specifically for the Doctoral Consortium will be forthcoming. Further details will be provided at the conference website.

Papers should not exceed 10 pages in the approved style. Style format template files can be found ACM SIG Proceedings Tempates page. While papers can be prepared using LaTeX or Word, all papers should be converted to PDF prior to submission. All papers must be submitted electronically to the conference support system, by the paper submission deadline.

Reviewing for ICAIL 2017 will be double blind. The first page of each submitted paper should include the title of the paper and the ID number of the paper as allocated when the paper is registered on the conference support system. Papers submitted for review should not include names and affiliations of the authors, nor an acknowledgements section. These aspects can be added at the camera-ready stage. 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.

The program committee reserves the right to reject, without review, papers not conforming to the submission guidelines or disclosing the identity of the authors.

Authors will be notified of the acceptance decision by the date indicated above. Papers not accepted for full publication and presentation may be accepted as short research abstracts. Papers (including research abstracts) must be presented at the conference in order to appear in the proceedings (and, moreover, all papers and abstracts presented at the conference will appear in the proceedings). Final versions of papers for publication in the proceedings will be due by the date indicated above.

Carole Hafner ICAIL 2017 Best Paper Award

IAAIL has established the best paper award in honour of Carole Hafner, an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Northeastern University. She was one of the founders of the conference and a founding editor of the AI and Law Journal. The prize is awarded to the paper that most advances the state-of-the art of the discipline based on the evaluation criteria for research papers. Notification will be made through the ICAIL website, and the award will be presented at the conference banquet.

Donald H. Berman Award for Best Student Paper

IAAIL has established a best student paper award in memory of Donald H. Berman, a Professor of Law at Northeastern University who was a co-founder of the AI and Law journal. The award consists of a cash gift and free attendance at ICAIL 2017. 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. Notification will be made through the ICAIL website, and the award will be presented at the conference banquet.

Peter Jackson Award for Best Innovative Application Paper

Following the success of the previous edition, ICAIL 2017 continues to offer the best innovative application paper award 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. Notification will be made through the ICAIL website, and the award will be presented at the conference banquet.