Final Call for Paper and Deadline Extension

ICAIL 2017

The 16th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law
King's College London, June 12 to June 16, 2017.

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 the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI). The conference proceedings are published by ACM. The journal Artificial
Intelligence and Law regularly publishes expanded versions of selected ICAIL
papers.

Important Dates (Tentative)
---------------------------

- Deadline for submission of papers: January 27, 2017
- Notification of acceptance: April 7, 2017
- Conference: June 12-16, 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
- 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: http://nms.kcl.ac.uk/icail2017/

Submission Details, including instructions for blind review
-----------------------------------------------------------

Papers should not exceed 10 pages in the approved style. Style format template
files can be found at http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template.
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,
https://www.conftool.net/icail2017/ by the paper submission deadline. To aid
the reviewing process, authors are requested to submit abstracts of their
papers by the above abstract submission deadline. Abstract submissions should
include the paper title, up to four keywords, and a contact address for the
corresponding author. Both papers and abstracts should be submitted
electronically to the conference support system.

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.

Conference Officials
--------------------

Program Chair
-------------

Guido Governatori
Data61, CSIRO, Australia
guido.governatori@data61.csiro.au

Conference Chair
----------------

Jeroen Keppens
King's College London, UK
jeroen.keppens@kcl.ac.uk


Secretary/Treasurer
-------------------

Anne Gardner
International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law
gardner@cs.stanford.edu