Special Issue Call for Papers
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR LAW
Computer Law & Security Review - Elsevier Journal (IF 2.7)

Legal Informatics represents a multidisciplinary field that is receiving growing attention in terms of both scientific challenges and real applications. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the main cornerstones of this development, with novel research methods in the Knowledge Modeling (KM) sub-area, also deeply connected with Information Extraction (IE) technologies.

The application of innovative technologies for processing legal documents and AI methods applied to legal issues can support the work of public administrations and private companies in the legal field. Informatics facilitates access to understandability of legal knowledge, including judgments, recommendations, legislation, citizens’ constitutional rights, and soft law. Legal ontologies, for instance, highlight the nature of links between legal norms; the application of specific algorithms supports semi-automatic interpretation of legal provisions and prediction of judicial decisions.
Digital justice and digital law improve the daily work by speeding up the resolution of legal issues, including support for legal compliance and access to complex and extensive legal knowledge. Likewise, the digitalization of law has a socio-political impact by making legal knowledge accessible to a broader audience of citizens, increasing the opportunity to express themselves, and raising awareness of prominent legal issues.

Typical goals and applications include:
i) automatic classification of legal documents,
ii) legal design of ontologies and representation frameworks,
iii) computation of similarity among legal sources of data for clustering or intelligent search mechanisms,
iv) prediction & support in decision-making and for supporting legal interpretation,
v) sectoral and transversal studies such as diachronic legal analyses outlining the evolution of legal concepts and definitions over time,
vi) detection of linguistic phenomena and patterns in legal sources,
vii) multilingual alignments of concepts on domestic and international legal sources,
viii) identification of legal references and network analysis,
ix) analogical reasoning and compliance checking, and so forth.

Important Dates
Title and Extended abstract (max 4 pages, single column format): 12th December 2022
Response to authors: 19th December 2022
Full papers due: 20th March 2023 (EXTENDED!! - Strict)
[Standard review process]
Final notification: 1st October 2023

Topics
The Special Issue on KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR LAW focuses on the wide-ranging topic of AI, KM and IE methods in legal informatics:
Automated knowledge extraction from legal text corpora and databases
Natural language processing for legal documents
Legal ontologies, visual law, legal design
Multilingual alignments, retrieval, extraction and analysis of legal sources
Entity recognition, disambiguation, identification of legal semantic roles
Link analysis, linked data, and knowledge graphs in the legal domain
Computational models of argumentation for legal data
Machine Learning and Deep Learning for legal text
Information retrieval and multimedia search for legal documents
Question answering, dialogue and discourse analysis, query understanding
Legal text summarization and generation
Ethical or fairness issues and computing in the legal domain
Applications in legal data and knowledge engineering

Review Process
All manuscripts for the Special Issue will be peer-reviewed in a standard double-blind review process by a minimum number of 3 reviewers, following the review process of the Journal.
The editors will provide their recommendations and feedback to the authors during each round of revision of the submitted papers.

Instructions for authors
Contributing papers must not be published or currently under review for publication elsewhere; however, they could be extended versions of conference papers provided that the submitted manuscript contains a significant amount of novel contributions as well as differences with respect to the earlier conference paper.
Please follows the Guide for Authors

Submissions

Manuscript can be submitted through the journal's editorial submission system (registration required):
https://www.editorialmanager.com/CLSR

Select VSI:KM4LAW in the Dropdown menu “Select Article Type”.

Please follows the Elseviers' Guide for Authors"
https://www.elsevier.com/journals/procedia-computer-science/1877-0509/guide-for-authors


Guest editors
Luigi Di Caro, Univ. of Torino, Italy
Rohan Nanda, Univ. of Maastricht, Netherlands
Emilio Sulis, Univ. of Torino, Italy