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24 A.I. & L. 1 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/artinl24 and id is 1 raw text is: Artif Intell Law (2016) 24:1-49 DOI 10.1007/s10506-016-9178-1 rossMrk A methodology for designing systems to reason with legal cases using Abstract Dialectical Frameworks Latifa Al-Abdulkarim' - Katie Atkinson'- Trevor Bench-Capon' Published online: 12 March 2016 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Abstract This paper presents a methodology to design and implement programs intended to decide cases, described as sets of factors, according to a theory of a particular domain based on a set of precedent cases relating to that domain. We use Abstract Dialectical Frameworks (ADFs), a recent development in Al knowledge representation, as the central feature of our design method. ADFs will play a role akin to that played by Entity-Relationship models in the design of database systems. First, we explain how the factor hierarchy of the well-known legal reasoning system CATO can be used to instantiate an ADF for the domain of US Trade Secrets. This is intended to demonstrate the suitability of ADFs for expressing the design of legal cased based systems. The method is then applied to two other legal domains often used in the literature of Al and Law. In each domain, the design is provided by the domain analyst expressing the cases in terms of factors organised into an ADF from which an executable program can be implemented in a straightforward way by taking advantage of the closeness of the acceptance conditions of the ADF to components of an executable program. We evaluate the ease of implementation, the performance and efficacy of the resulting program, ease of refinement of the pro- gram and the transparency of the reasoning. This evaluation suggests ways in which ® Latifa Al-Abdulkarim latifak@liverpool.ac.uk Katie Atkinson Katie@liverpool.ac.uk Trevor Bench-Capon tbc@liverpool.ac.uk Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Ashton Street, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK _ Springer