Jos Dumortier

Abstracting of legal cases: the SALOMON experience

ing of Legal Cases: The SALOMON Experience Marie-Francine Moens, Caroline Uyttendaele, Jos Dumortier Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and IT (ICRI) K.U. Leuven Tiensestraat 41 B-3000 Leuven Belgium {marie-france.moens, caroline.uyttendaele, jos.dumortier}@law.kuleuven.ac.be

Abstracting of legal cases: the potential of clustering based on the selection of representative objects

The SALOMON project automatically summarizes Belgian criminal cases in order to improve access to the large number of existing and future court decisions. SALOMON extracts text units from the case text to form a case summary. Such a case summary facilitates the rapid determination of the relevance of the case or may be employed in text search. An important part of the research concerns the development of techniques for automatic recognition of representative text paragraphs (or sentences) in texts of unrestricted domains. These techniques are employed to eliminate redundant material in the case texts, and to identify informative text paragraphs which are relevant to include in the case An evaluation of a test set of 700 criminal cases demonstrates that the algorithms have an application potential for automatic indexing, abstracting, and text linking.

Revocable anonymous access to the Internet

With the worldwide growth of open telecommunication networks and in particular the Internet, the privacy and security concerns of people using these networks have increased. On the one hand, users are concerned about their privacy, and desire to anonymously access the network. On the other hand, some organizations are concerned about how this anonymous access might be abused. This paper intends to bridge these conflicting interests, and proposes a solution for revocable anonymous access to the Internet. Moreover, the paper presents some legal background and motivation for such a solution. However, the paper also indicates some difficulties and disadvantages of the proposed solution, and suggests the need for further debate on the issue of online anonymity.

Generic technologies for single- and multi-document summarization

The technologies for single- and multi-document summarization that are described and evaluated in this article can be used on heterogeneous texts for different summarization tasks. They refer to the extraction of important sentences from the documents, compressing the sentences to their essential or relevant content, and detecting redundant content across sentences. The technologies are tested at the Document Understanding Conference, organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA in 2002 and 2003. The system obtained good to very good results in this competition. We tested our summarization system also on a variety of English Encyclopedia texts and on Dutch magazine articles. The results show that relying on generic linguistic resources and statistical techniques offer a basis for text summarization.

Salomon: Automatic Abstracting of Legal Cases for Effective Access to Court Decisions

The SALOMON project is a contribution to the automatic processing of legal texts. Its aim is to automatically summarise Belgian criminal cases in order to improve access to the large number of existing and future cases. Therefore, techniques are developed for identifying and extracting relevant information from the cases. A broader application of these techniques could considerably simplify the work of the legal profession.A double methodology was used when developing SALOMON: the cases are processed by employing additional knowledge to interpret structural patterns and features on the one hand and by way of occurrence statistics of index terms on the other. As a result, SALOMON performs an initial categorisation and structuring of the cases and subsequently extracts the most relevant text units of the alleged offences and of the opinion of the court. The SALOMON techniques do not themselves solve any legal questions, but they do guide the user effectively towards relevant texts.

Text categorization: the assignment of subject descriptors to magazine articles

Abstract Automatic text categorization is an important research area and has a potential for many text-based applications including text routing and filtering. Typical text classifiers learn from example texts that are manually categorized. When categorizing magazine articles with broad subject descriptors, we study three aspects of text classification: (1) effective selection of feature words and proper names that reflect the main topics of the text; (2) learning algorithms; and (3) improvement of the quality of the learned classifier by selection of examples. The χ 2 test, which is sometimes used for selecting terms that are highly related to a text class, is applied in a novel way when constructing a category weight vector. Despite a limited number of training examples, combining an effective feature selection with the χ 2 learning algorithm for training the text classifier results in an adequate categorization of new magazine articles.

Information extraction from legal texts: the potential of discourse analysis

Abstract There is an urgent need to automatically identify information in legal texts. In this paper, we argue that discourse analysis yields valuable knowledge to be incorporated in text processing systems. Knowledge about discourse patterns has already been applied in legal text generation systems. But, it is equally important to incorporate this kind of knowledge in legal information extraction systems. This knowledge is helpful for locating information in texts. Also, we demonstrate the need for adequate, maintainable, and possibly sharable knowledge representations of discourse patterns. The findings are illustrated by explicating the role discourse analysis played when building the SALOMON system, a system that automatically abstracts Belgian criminal cases.

Towards a European Framework for the Re‐use of Public Sector Information: a Long and Winding Road

Information owned by public sector bodies has, next to democratic importance, a considerable economic value for the industry in general and the information industry in particular. Since the 1980s, the European Commission has tried to stimulate the public sector to make its information available for re-use. In June 2002, it finally presented a proposal for a directive on this subject. This article gives an overview of events and documents leading to this proposal and attempts to make an assessment of the proposal. It is updated until 1 February, 2003.

The Accountability Principle in Data Protection Regulation: Origin, Development and Future Directions

Accountability made its formal debut in the field of international data protection more than 30 years ago, when it was adopted as a data protection principle in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Guidelines.4 As of late, the policy discourse on the regulation of data protection has been rife with references to accountability. Most notably, in 2010, the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party issued an Opinion on the principle of accountability in which it elaborated upon the possibility of including a general provision on accountability in the revised Data Protection Directive.5 The European Commission has also made a reference to the possibility of introducing a principle of accountability in its subsequent Communication outlining a strategy for modernising the EU data protection framework.6 Within the context of these documents, the introduction of an accountability principle is seen mainly as a way to help ensure ‘that data controllers put in place effective policies and mechanisms to ensure compliance with data protection rules’.7 While this objective is in line with previous iterations of the principle of accountability, important nuances exist among the various documents which have promulgated accountability as a data protection principle.

Searching the man behind the tag: privacy implications of RFID technology

The emergence of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology provides the potential for vast and varied applications, bringing with it both promise and peril. RFID tags used as the medium for the collection and transmission of personal data, as well as tracing devices for the location of natural persons, open a Pandoras box regarding the privacy rights of individuals. The goal of this paper is to present the main privacy threats that arise from the widespread use of RFID technology and to illustrate the issues that have to be taken into consideration at the designing phase of an RFID application. The legislative initiative on RFID in the European Union (EU) will be presented and finally, a brief overview of the situation in the USA will be given.