There are cases in which the literal interpretation of statutes may lead to counterintuitive consequences. When such cases go to high courts, judges may handle these counterintuitive consequences by identifying problematic rule conditions. Given that the law consists of a large number of rule conditions, it is demanding and exhaustive to figure out which condition is problematic. For solving this problem, our work aims to assist judges in civil law systems to resolve counterintuitive consequences using logic program representation of statutes (...) and Legal Debugging. The core principle of Legal Debugging is to cooperate with a user to find a culprit, a root cause of counterintuitive consequences. This article proposes an algorithm to resolve a culprit. Since the statutes are represented by logic rules but changes in law are initiated by cases, we adopt a prototypical case with judgement specified by a set of rules. Then, to resolve a culprit, we reconstruct a program so that it provides reasons as if we applied case-based reasoning to a new set of prototypical cases with judgement, which include a new set of facts relevant to a considering case. (shrink)

Formalising deontic concepts, such as obligation, prohibition and permission, is normally carried out in a modal logic with a possible world semantics, in which some worlds are better than others. The main focus in these logics is on inferring logical consequences, for example inferring that the obligation O q is a logical consequence of the obligations O p and O. In this paper we propose a non-modal approach in which obligations are preferred ways of satisfying goals expressed in first-order logic. (...) To say that p is obligatory, but may be violated, resulting in a less than ideal situation s, means that the task is to satisfy the goal p ∨ s, and that models in which p is true are preferred to models in which s is true. Whereas, in modal logic, the preference relation between possible worlds is part of the semantics of the logic, in this non-modal approach, the preference relation between first-order models is external to the logic. Although our main focus is on satisfying goals, we also formulate a notion of logical consequence, which is comparable to the notion of logical consequence in modal deontic logic. In this formalisation, an obligation O p is a logical consequence of goals G, when p is true in all best models of G. We show how this non-modal approach to the treatment of deontic concepts deals with problems of contrary-to-duty obligations and normative conflicts, and argue that the approach is useful for many other applications, including abductive explanations, defeasible reasoning, combinatorial optimisation, and reactive systems of the production system variety. (shrink)

The ascidian embryo has long provided a model system for ‘mosaic’ development. This article reviews recent advances in the study of ascidian developmental biology. These include: (a) the re‐analysis of cell lineages in ascidian embryos with the ascertainment of developmental fates of every blastomere of a 110‐cell embryo; (b) the development of several tissue‐specific monoclonal antibodies; (c) the investigation and description of cell cycle requirements for differentiation; it has been found that neither cytokinesis nor nuclear division is required for differentiation, (...) but that several rounds of DNA replication are essential for the expression of certain tissue‐specific genes; and (d) the demonstration by new descriptive and experimental studies of the presence of cytoplasmic factors or determinants responsible for specification of embryonic cell features; myoplasm which is thought to contain muscle determinants has been isolated, and immunological attempts to elucidate the molecular nature of the factors have begun. (shrink)

Multimorbidity, the presence of multiple health conditions that must be addressed, is a particularly difficult situation in patient management raising issues such as the use of multiple drugs and drug-disease interactions. Clinical Guidelines are evidence-based statements which provide recommendations for specific health conditions but are unfit for the management of multiple co-occurring health situations. To leverage these evidence-based documents, it becomes necessary to combine them. In this paper, using a case example, we explore the use of argumentation schemes to reason (...) and combine evidence-based recommendations from clinical guidelines, expected effects, conflicts stemming from said recommendations, and preferences regarding treatment goals. We compare the results of reasoning using the schemes for practical reasoning and argument from negative consequences in the Carneades Argumentation System with those of ASPIC-G, an extension of the artificial intelligence system ASPIC+. (shrink)

We present our method for tackling a legal case retrieval task by introducing our method of encoding documents by summarizing them into continuous vector space via our phrase scoring framework utilizing deep neural networks. On the other hand, we explore the benefits from combining lexical features and latent features generated with neural networks. Our experiments show that lexical features and latent features generated with neural networks complement each other to improve the retrieval system performance. Furthermore, our experimental results suggest the (...) importance of case summarization in different aspects: using provided summaries and performing encoded summarization. Our approach achieved F1 of 65.6% and 57.6% on the experimental datasets of legal case retrieval tasks. (shrink)

This paper analyses and compares some of the automated reasoners that have been used in recent research for compliance checking. Although the list of the considered reasoners is not exhaustive, we believe that our analysis is representative enough to take stock of the current state of the art in the topic. We are interested here in formalizations at the _first-order_ level. Past literature on normative reasoning mostly focuses on the _propositional_ level. However, the propositional level is of little usefulness for (...) concrete LegalTech applications, in which compliance checking must be enforced on (large) sets of individuals. Furthermore, we are interested in technologies that are _freely available_ and that can be further investigated and compared by the scientific community. In other words, this paper does not consider technologies only employed in industry and/or whose source code is non-accessible. This paper formalizes a selected use case in the considered reasoners and compares the implementations, also in terms of simulations with respect to shared synthetic datasets. The comparison will highlight that lot of further research still needs to be done to integrate the benefits featured by the different reasoners into a single standardized first-order framework, suitable for LegalTech applications. All source codes are freely available at https://github.com/liviorobaldo/compliancecheckers, together with instructions to locally reproduce the simulations. (shrink)

This study aimed to identify the learning and business incubation processes and their impact on developing the performance of business incubators in Gaza Strip, and the study relied on the descriptive analytical approach, and the study population consisted of all employees working in business incubators in Gaza Strip in addition to experts and consultants in incubators where their total number reached (62) individuals, and the researchers used the questionnaire as a main tool to collect data through the comprehensive survey method, (...) where (55) questionnaires were retrieved with a recovery rate of (88.7%). The results of the study showed that there is a high approval of the variables of the study, where the dimension of incubation operations came with a relative weight (84.89%), followed by the learning dimension which got a relative weight (82.50%), while the performance level of the incubators got a relative weight (80.12%) and as the study results showed There is a positive relationship statistically between the two dimensions of learning and business incubation processes and performance development in business incubators, and the linear regression analysis model showed that the main effect in improving the performance of business incubators is "after business incubation operations" while it showed weak effect after learning. The study came out with several recommendations, the most important of which is that business incubators seek to reinforce the learning process and incubation processes for business, and the need to periodically evaluate their performance, and that a more effective mechanism be designed to follow up with companies after the end of the incubation period and monitor the progress of these companies. (shrink)

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of three international workshops organized by the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, held in Tokyo, Japan in June 2006 during the 20th Annual Conference JSAI 2006. The volume starts with eight award winning papers of the JSAI 2006 main conference that are presented along with the 21 revised full workshop papers, carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume.

This paper proposes several recurrent neural network-based models for recognizing requisite and effectuation parts in Legal Texts. Firstly, we propose a modification of BiLSTM-CRF model that allows the use of external features to improve the performance of deep learning models in case large annotated corpora are not available. However, this model can only recognize RE parts which are not overlapped. Secondly, we propose two approaches for recognizing overlapping RE parts including the cascading approach which uses the sequence of BiLSTM-CRF models (...) and the unified model approach with the multilayer BiLSTM-CRF model and the multilayer BiLSTM-MLP-CRF model. Experimental results on two Japan law RRE datasets demonstrated advantages of our proposed models. For the Japanese National Pension Law dataset, our approaches obtained an \ score of 93.27% and exhibited a significant improvement compared to previous approaches. For the Japan Civil Code RRE dataset which is written in English, our approaches produced an \ score of 78.24% in recognizing RE parts that exhibited a significant improvement over strong baselines. In addition, using external features and in-domain pre-trained word embeddings also improved the performance of RRE systems. (shrink)

In the court of law, a person can be punished for attempting to commit a crime. An open issue in the study of Artificial Intelligence and Law is whether the law of attempts could be formally modelled. There are distinct legal rules for determining attempted crime whereas the last-act rule (also called proximity rule) represents the strictest approach. In this paper, we provide a formal model of the last-act rule using structured argumentation.

Case law retrieval is the task of locating truly relevant legal cases given an input query case. Unlike information retrieval for general texts, this task is more complex with two phases (legal case retrieval and legal case entailment) and much harder due to a number of reasons. First, both the query and candidate cases are long documents consisting of several paragraphs. This makes it difficult to model with representation learning that usually has restriction on input length. Second, the concept of (...) relevancy in this domain is defined based on the legal relation that goes beyond the lexical or topical relevance. This is a real challenge because normal text matching will not work. Third, building a large and accurate legal case dataset requires a lot of effort and expertise. This is obviously an obstacle to creating enough data for training deep retrieval models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called supporting model that can deal with both phases. The underlying idea is the case–case supporting relation and the paragraph–paragraph as well as the decision-paragraph matching strategy. In addition, we propose a method to automatically create a large weak-labeling dataset to overcome the lack of data. The experiments showed that our solution has achieved the state-of-the-art results for both case retrieval and case entailment phases. (shrink)

The logical empiricists often appear as a foil for feminist theories. Their emphasis on the individualistic nature of knowledge and on the value-neutrality of science seems directly opposed to most feminist concerns. However, several recent works have highlighted aspects of Carnap's views that make him seem like much less of a straightforwardly positivist thinker. Certain of these aspects lend themselves to feminist concerns much more than the stereotypical picture would imply.

In his groundbreaking work of 1969, Spinoza's Metaphysics: An Essay in Interpretation, Edwin Curley attacked the traditional understanding of the substance-mode relation in Spinoza, which makes modes inhere in the substance. Curley argued that such an interpretation generates insurmountable problems, as had been already claimed by Pierre Bayle in his famous entry on Spinoza. Instead of having the modes inhere in the substance Curley suggested that the modes’ dependence upon the substance should be interpreted in terms of (efficient) causation, i.e., (...) as committing Spinoza to nothing over and above the claim that the substance is the (efficient) cause of the modes. These bold and fascinating claims generated one of the most important scholarly controversies in Spinoza scholarship of the past thirty-five years. In this chapter I argue against Curley’s interpretation and attempt to reestablish the traditional understanding of Spinozistic modes as inhering in God and as predicated of God. I also criticize Curley’s philosophical motivation for suggesting this interpretation. I do believe, however, that Curley is right about the existence of an intimate connection between the substance-mode relation and causation in Spinoza. In the next chapter I will study the notion of ‘immanent cause’, which merges efficient causality and inherence. I will clarify the relation between immanent, efficient and material causation, and show where precisely Spinoza diverged from the traditional Aristotelian taxonomy of causes. In the second chapter I also discuss the German Idealists’ view of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’. Under this interpretation Spinoza was a modern reviver of Eleatic monism, who allegedly asserts the mere existence of God, and denies the reality of the world of particular things. Spinozistic modes - according to this reading - are nothing but passing and unreal phenomena. Though this view of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’ can be supported by some lines in Spinoza’s thought, I believe it should be rejected since it is not consistent with some of the most central doctrines of the Ethics. In the final part of the second chapter I discuss the relation between modes and the attributes under which they fall, and suggest a terminological distinction between a ‘mode of God’ (i.e., a mode under all attributes) and a ‘mode of an attribute’ (i.e., a mode under a specific attribute), a distinction which can help us avoid some common confusions in the treatment of the issue. (shrink)

The acknowledgement of basic human vulnerability in relationships between mental health service users and professionals working in community-based mental health services (in Norway) was a starting point. The purpose was to explore how users of these services describe and make sense of their meetings with other people. The research is collaborative, with researcher and person with experienced-based knowledge cooperating through the research process. Data is derived from 19 interviews with 11 people who depend on mental health services for assistance at (...) least three times a week. Data is analysed according to the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results confirm that reciprocity is fundamental for relationships, and that recognizing the individual entails personal involvement. The participants describe a struggle, and recognizing this struggle may help the professional to achieve a deeper understanding of the individual. (shrink)

Natural language processing techniques contribute more and more in analyzing legal documents recently, which supports the implementation of laws and rules using computers. Previous approaches in representing a legal sentence often based on logical patterns that illustrate the relations between concepts in the sentence, often consist of multiple words. Those representations cause the lack of semantic information at the word level. In our work, we aim to tackle such shortcomings by representing legal texts in the form of abstract meaning representation, (...) a graph-based semantic representation that gains lots of polarity in NLP community recently. We present our study in AMR Parsing and AMR-to-text Generation specifically for legal domain. We also introduce JCivilCode, a human-annotated legal AMR dataset which was created and verified by a group of linguistic and legal experts. We conduct an empirical evaluation of various approaches in parsing and generating AMR on our own dataset and show the current challenges. Based on our observation, we propose our domain adaptation method applying in the training phase and decoding phase of a neural AMR-to-text generation model. Our method improves the quality of text generated from AMR graph compared to the baseline model. 2018; and “Legal Text Generation fromMeaning Representation”, published in the 32nd International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems 2019.). (shrink)

The article examines the new discourse on medical professionalism and responsibility through the prism of conflicts among moral values, especially with regard to truth-telling. The discussion is anchored in the renaissance of English-language writing on medical ethics in the 18th century, which paralleled the rise of humanitarianism and the advent of the word “responsibility”. Following an analysis of the meanings of the value of responsibility in general and in medical practice in particular, it is argued that, similarly to the Aristotelian (...) notion of equity, responsibility of care is a second-order value, which corrects virtues, laws and norms in exceptional circumstances. Virtues and practices of the second order, such as responsibility and deliberation, bear especially on professional doctoring, which includes a commitment to give priority to the good of the patient over one’s own good. It is argued that, in situations of conflict, and particularly conflicts between personal moral identity and the good of patients, the fundamental professional commitment is to critical and rational deliberation and to the cultivation of psycho-moral flexibility. This leads indirectly to moral growth and strengthening of professional character. (shrink)

La presente versión del tratado De Bono Habitu Liber o El libro sobre la buena condición, de Galeno de Pérgamo, se presenta al lector de habla hispana como un acercamiento a la prolífca obra flosófca de quien fuera reconocido en su época como un notable médico anatomista y físico. Los argumentos expuestos por el autor acerca de la ‘buena condición’ dan cuenta de la infuencia retórica de Platón y Aristóteles, al mismo tiempo, de las enseñanzas médicas de Hipócrates. Junto al (...) texto original y la traducción al español, se ofrece una versión en latín empleada en el proceso de traducción como un apoyo para resolver las difcultades textuales y léxicas que presentaba el texto griego, al permitir confrontar una recepción medieval del tratado. (shrink)

Explaining how stereotypes and norms influence role-identities during reflected appraisal processes, we develop a theory about diverse groups of minority men—the “minority masculinity stress theory”—and apply it to Asian American men. We conceptually integrate hegemonic masculinity, stereotypes, and mental health to examine how Asian American men experience masculinity and how their experiences are uniquely stressful. We analyze elicited text from an open-ended questionnaire to explain two experiences of masculinity-related stress: trying to live up to the masculine ideal and enacting work-related (...) role-identities. Regarding the former, we discuss four illustrations—toughness, body image, restrictive emotionality, and heterosexuality—and two involving the latter—achiever and provider. We found that Asian American men receive stereotypical reflected appraisals that contradict potentially positive self-concepts and emphasize achievement beyond typical standards of hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, Asian American men’s role-identities contradict hegemonic masculinity, resulting in reflected appraisals that predispose them toward stress. (shrink)

_Huangdi Neijing_ is a classic medical text of ancient China. Composed of two sections, _Suwen_ and _Lingshu_, the book is filled with enduring wisdom and insight and is still consulted by doctors today. This translation is based largely on Li Zhongzi's concise 1642 edition, titled _Neijing Zhiyao_, and continues the centuries-long effort to annotate the text, especially in light of modern developments in medicine. Instead of "explaining a classic with a classic," this edition adds commentaries and emendations that enhance the (...) theoretical core of _Huangdi Neijing_, illuminating a seminal work of Chinese medicine that covers much more than the basic principles of yin-yang and the five elements. (shrink)