On original generation of structure in legal documents
Steven Orla Kimbrough, Thomas Y. Lee, Balaji Padmanabhan, Yinghui Yang · 2003
This position paper advocates a vision in the development of automated legal reasoning and presents evidence supporting the plausibility of that vision. The paper observes that original creation of documents of legal import in either fully formal or semistructured form offers the prospect of greatly reducing the cost and expanding the scope of knowledge engineering for legal reasoning. This, it is claimed, is most likely to be achieved via formalization of various sublanguages of legal discourse. SeaSpeak is an example of such a sublanguage and it appears to be amenable to full formalization. Short of that, much can be done with partial formalization and semistructured documents. The paper presents a tabular format for message expression, motivated by a formal agent communication language.