The exponential digitization of medical data has led to a transformation of the practice of medicine. This change notably raises a new complexity of issues surrounding health IT. The proper use of these communication tools, such as telemedicine, e-health, m-health the big medical data, should improve the quality of monitoring and care of patients for an information system to "human face". Faced with these challenges, the author analyses in an ethical angle the patient-physician relationship, sharing, transmission and storage (...) of medical information, setting pins to an ethic for the digitization of medical information. Drawing on good practice recommendations closely associated with values, this model is developing tools for reflection and present the keys to understanding the decision-making issues that reflect both the technological constraints and the complex nature of human reality in medicine. (shrink)

Emerging technologies present a challenging but fascinating set of ethical, legal and regulatory issues. The articles selected for this volume provide a broad overview of the most influential historical and current thinking in this area and show that existing frameworks are often inadequate to address new technologies - such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, synthetic biology and robotics - and innovative new models are needed. This collection brings together invaluable, innovative and often complementary approaches for overcoming the unique challenges of emerging technology (...) ethics and governance. (shrink)

The design of Web browsers has resulted in a transfer of power to Web users and developers who often lack an ethical framework in which to act. For example, the technology makes it simple to copy and use other people’s Web page formatting without their permission. The author argues that we need to educate more people about ethical Web practices, and the author asks for “rules of the road” which amateurs and professionals can understand and follow. This article discusses four (...) areas of concern about Web development: the browser wars, information storage and retrieval, access for the handicapped, and cookies. For teachers, there are suggestions on how to use browsers to help students learn about Web ethics. (shrink)

Background Biobanking and genomic research requires collection and storage of human tissue from study participants. From participants’ perspectives within the African context, this can be associated with fears and misgivings due to a myriad of factors including myths and mistrust of researchers. From the researchers angle ethical dilemmas may arise especially with consenting and sample reuse during storage. The aim of this paper was to explore these ethical considerations in the establishment and conduct of biobanking and genomic studies (...) in Africa. Methods We conducted a narrative synthesis following a comprehensive search of nine (9) databases and grey literature. All primary research study designs were eligible for inclusion as well as both quantitative and qualitative evidence from peer reviewed journals, spanning a maximum of 20 years (2000–2020). It focused on research work conducted in Africa, even if data was stored or analysed outside the region. Results Of 2,663 title and abstracts screened, 94 full texts were retrieved and reviewed for eligibility. We included 12 studies (7 qualitative; 4 quantitative and one mixed methods). Ethical issues described in these papers related to community knowledge and understanding of biobanking and genomic research, regulation, and governance of same by research ethics committees, enrolment of participants, types of informed consents, data collection, storage, usage and sharing as well as material transfer, returning results and benefit sharing. ca. Biospecimen collection and storage is given in trust and participants expect confidentially of data and results generated. Most participants are comfortable with broad consent due to trust in researchers, though a few would like to be contacted for reconsenting in future studies, and this would depend on whether the new research is for good cause. Sharing data with external partners is welcome in some contexts but some research participants did not trust foreign researchers. Conclusion Biobanking and genomic studies are a real need in Africa. Linked to this are ethical considerations related to setting up and participation in biobanks as well as data storage, export, use and sharing. There is emerging or pre-existing consensus around the acceptability of broad consent as a suitable model of consent, the need for Africans to take the lead in international collaborative studies, with deliberate efforts to build capacity in local storage and analysis of samples and employ processes of sample collection and use that build trust of communities and potential study participants. Research ethics committees, researchers and communities need to work together to work together to adapt and use clearly defined ethical frameworks, guidelines, and policy documents to harmonize the establishment and running of biobanking and genomic research in Africa. (shrink)

It is now more than ten years since the EU FET project ALFEBIITE finished, during which its researchers made original and distinctive contributions to (inter alia) formal models of trust, model-checking, and action logics. ALFEBIITE was also a highly inter-disciplinary project, with partners from computer science, philosophy, cognitive science and law. In this paper, we reflect on the interaction between computer scientists and information and IT lawyers on the idea of the ‘open agent society’. This inspired a programme of (...) research whose investigation into conceptual challenges has carried it from the logical specification of agent societies and dynamic norm-governed systems to self-organising electronic institutions, while developing several technologies for agent-based modelling and complex event recognition. The outcomes of this inter-disciplinary collaboration have also influenced current research into using the open agent society as a platform for socio-technical systems, and other collective adaptive systems. We present a number of research challenges, including the ideas of computational justice and polycentric governance, and explore a number of ethical, legal and social implications. We contend that, in order to address these issues and challenges, the continued inter-disciplinary collaboration between computer science and IT lawyers is critical. (shrink)

Information technology is so ubiquitous and AI’s progress so inspiring that also legal professionals experience its benefits and have high expectations. At the same time, the powers of AI have been rising so strongly that it is no longer obvious that AI applications (whether in the law or elsewhere) help promoting a good society; in fact they are sometimes harmful. Hence many argue that safeguards are needed for AI to be trustworthy, social, responsible, humane, ethical. In short: AI should (...) be good for us. But how to establish proper safeguards for AI? One strong answer readily available is: consider the problems and solutions studied in AI & Law. AI & Law has worked on the design of social, explainable, responsible AI aligned with human values for decades already, AI & Law addresses the hardest problems across the breadth of AI (in reasoning, knowledge, learning and language), and AI & Law inspires new solutions (argumentation, schemes and norms, rules and cases, interpretation). It is argued that the study of AI as Law supports the development of an AI that is good for us, making AI & Law more relevant than ever. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mild Cognitive Impairment:What's in a Name?Steven R. Sabat (bio)Keywordslabeling, mild cognitive impairment, recall memory, selfhood, stereotype threatCorner and Bond (2006) raise a number of important conceptual issues related to the problems involved in defining mild cognitive impairment (MCI), differentiating it from normal aging, the definition of normal aging itself, and ethical issues surrounding the possible adverse effects of a diagnosis of MCI on the individuals thus described. It would (...) seem that portentous ramifications are involved and that clarifying the conceptual issues would be of great value, not only to researchers but also to the ever-growing population of elderly people. In what follows, I address some of these issues further.Problems of Definition and MeasurementOne of the problems that the authors discuss at the outset of their article concerns what methods are appropriate for detecting those with MCI: "Neuropsychological tests alone do not discriminate between normal aged-related memory loss and MCI or dementia and clinical judgment remains central to diagnosis" (Corner and Bond 2006, 5). Of course, to be able to discriminate between normal aged-related memory problems and MCI, we must first be able to define the former. What exactly is normal? As the authors correctly point out, the term has different meanings, one being normative (usual), another being nonpathologic. Is it normal (usual) for some sort of breakdown to occur in brain systems as a function of increased age? If so, is there a threshold age below which the very same physiologic breakdown is unusual? Would such a threshold age, if one existed, be the same for everyone, regardless of genotype and the cumulative interactive effects of nutrition, health, and stress-related factors over a period of decades? In effect, is some sort of memory impairment part of the natural (usual) process of aging for some people at particular ages rather than for others? And exactly what does it mean to be mildly impaired in the cognitive domain?Hogan and McKeith (2001) presented a working group's definition characterizing MCI such that people who complain about memory problems and who also provide objective evidence of such problems, yet who simultaneously display "normal general cognitive function and intact activities of daily living" (Hogan and McKeith 2001, 1131), should be identified and followed. Here again, however, we confront the problem of defining "normal general cognitive function" as well as "normal activities of daily living." Can one have normal general cognitive function without normal memory function? If so, what exactly constitutes [End Page 13] general cognitive function and on what conceptual or theoretical basis is such a definition valid? Furthermore, what sort of memory function are we talking about? Memory can be said to involve a number of stages: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Retrieval can be of the explicit type (conscious recall or recognition of specific information) with which people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) often reveal deficits or of the implicit type (a change in behavior as a result of previous experience of which the person may have no conscious recollection) as demonstrated in people with AD (Knopman and Nissen 1987). That is, people with AD can display deficits in explicit memory functions without similar deficits simultaneously in implicit memory functions.A partial answer to the question about memory loss in MCI may be found in the use of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE; Folstein, Folstein, and McHugh 1975), originally intended to be used as a screening device, but employed more and more frequently as an outcome measure to assess cognitive decline as well as the efficacy of drug treatments. Although the examination purports to test orientation, registration, attention, calculation, recall, language (naming, repeating, reading, writing, three-stage command), and construction, a task analysis reveals that the test is not quite as "global" in the cognitive domain as it is purported to be. For example, ten of the maximum thirty points on the examination are earned for "orientation" in time and place. Yet, all of the questions in this section of the test require intact recall of the relevant information. For example, if a person is asked, "What day of the week is this?" and replies "I don't know," the... (shrink)

Automated legal reasoning and its application in smart contracts and automated decisions are increasingly attracting interest. In this context, ethical and legal concerns make it necessary for automated reasoners to justify in human-understandable terms the advice given. Logic Programming, specially Answer Set Programming, has a rich semantics and has been used to very concisely express complex knowledge. However, modelling discretionality to act and other vague concepts such as ambiguity cannot be expressed in top-down execution models based on Prolog, and in (...) bottom-up execution models based on ASP the justifications are incomplete and/or not scalable. We propose to use s(CASP), a top-down execution model for predicate ASP, to model vague concepts following a set of patterns. We have implemented a framework, called s(LAW), to model, reason, and justify the applicable legislation and validate it by translating (and benchmarking) a representative use case, the criteria for the admission of students in the “Comunidad de Madrid”. (shrink)

Objective To determine the attitudes of Egyptian patients regarding their participation in research and with the collection, storage and future use of blood samples for research purposes. Design Cross-sectional survey. Study population Adult Egyptian patients (n=600) at rural and urban hospitals and clinics. Results Less than half of the study population (44.3%) felt that informed consent forms should provide research participants the option to have their blood samples stored for future research. Of these participants, 39.9% thought that consent forms (...) should include the option that future research be restricted to the illness being studied. A slight majority (66.2%) would donate their samples for future genetic research. Respondents were more favourable towards having their blood samples exported to other Arab countries (62.0%) compared with countries in Europe (41.8%, p<0.001) and to the USA (37.2%, p<0.001). Conclusions This study shows that many individuals do not favour the donation of a blood sample for future research. Of those who do approve of such future research, many favour a consent model that includes an option restricting the future research to the illness being studied. Also, many Egyptians were hesitant to have their blood samples donated for genetic research or exported out of the Arab region to the USA and European countries. Further qualitative research should be performed to determine the underlying reasons for many of our results. (shrink)

Informed consent is recognized as a primary ethical requirement to conduct research involving humans. In the investigations with the use of human biological material, informed consent (IC) assumes a differentiated condition on account of the many future possibilities. This work presents suitable alternatives for IC regarding the storage and use of human biological material in research, according to new Brazilian regulations. Both norms – Resolution 441/11 of the National Health Council, approved on 12 May 2011, and Ordinance 2.201 (NATIONAL (...) GUIDELINES FOR BIOREPOSITORIES AND BIOBANKS OF HUMAN BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL FOR RESEARCH PURPOSE) of the Brazil Ministry of Health, approved on 14 September 2011 – state that the consent of subjects for the collection, storage and use of samples stored in Biobanks is necessarily established by means of a Free and Informed Consent Form (ICF). In order to obtain individual and formal statements, this form should contain the following two mutually exclusive options: an explanation about the use of the stored material in each research study, and the need for new consent or the waiver thereof when the material is used for a new study. On the other hand, ICF suitable for Biorepositories must be exclusive and related to specific research. Although Brazilian and international regulations identify the main aspects to be included in the IC, efforts are still necessary to improve the consent process, so that the document will become a bond of trust between subject and researcher. (shrink)

Informed consent is recognized as a primary ethical requirement to conduct research involving humans. In the investigations with the use of human biological material, informed consent (IC) assumes a differentiated condition on account of the many future possibilities. This work presents suitable alternatives for IC regarding the storage and use of human biological material in research, according to new Brazilian regulations. Both norms – Resolution 441/11 of the National Health Council, approved on 12 May 2011, and Ordinance 2.201 (NATIONAL (...) GUIDELINES FOR BIOREPOSITORIES AND BIOBANKS OF HUMAN BIOLOGICAL MATERIAL FOR RESEARCH PURPOSE) of the Brazil Ministry of Health, approved on 14 September 2011 – state that the consent of subjects for the collection, storage and use of samples stored in Biobanks is necessarily established by means of a Free and Informed Consent Form (ICF). In order to obtain individual and formal statements, this form should contain the following two mutually exclusive options: an explanation about the use of the stored material in each research study, and the need for new consent or the waiver thereof when the material is used for a new study. On the other hand, ICF suitable for Biorepositories must be exclusive and related to specific research. Although Brazilian and international regulations identify the main aspects to be included in the IC, efforts are still necessary to improve the consent process, so that the document will become a bond of trust between subject and researcher. (shrink)

Storage and secondary use of bloodspots collected for newborn screening raises controversies because of the particularly sensitive nature of the information that can be derived from them and the lack of national standards and consistent provincial policies that can serve to guide storage facilities. This report, derived through a review of Canadian and provincial policy statements, a survey of provincial newborn screening laboratory directors and program directors, as well as through a consultative workshop, illustrates the social, ethical (...) and legal issues regarding the storage, access and further uses of newborn bloodspots. The report indicates that there is a need for heightened transparency and clear recommendations concerning the criteria for storage, the duration of storage, and permissible secondary uses of dried bloodspots in Canada. (shrink)

In this work we study, design, and evaluate computational methods to support interpretation of statutory terms. We propose a novel task of discovering sentences for argumentation about the meaning of statutory terms. The task models the analysis of past treatment of statutory terms, an exercise lawyers routinely perform using a combination of manual and computational approaches. We treat the discovery of sentences as a special case of ad hoc document retrieval. The specifics include retrieval of short texts, specialized (...) document types, and, above all, the unique definition of document relevance provided in detailed annotation guidelines. To support our experiments we assembled a data set comprising 42 queries which we plan to release to the public in the near future in order to support further research. Most importantly, we investigate the feasibility of developing a system that responds to a query with a list of sentences that mention the term in a way that is useful for understanding and elaborating its meaning. This is accomplished by a systematic assessment of different features that model the sentences’ usefulness for interpretation. We combine features into a compound measure that accounts for multiple aspects. The definition of the task, the assembly of the data set, and the detailed task analysis provide a solid foundation for employing a learning-to-rank approach. (shrink)

One of the largest, oldest, and most interesting challenges in health care is the balancing act in which clinicians have generally uncontroversial duties both to individual patients and to communities. Physicians and nurses must — so we teach them — put patients first, and at the same time recognize that individuals are members of communities. Individuals affect the health of communities, and communities affect the health of individuals. Thus, the moral and professional duties that result are sometimes in conflict.Moreover, the (...) traditional, prosaic clinical encounter is evolving in an environment increasingly shaped by electronic health records, personal health records, pharmacogenomics and vast networks of data collection and storage for public health surveillance, human subjects research, health services evaluation, and comparative effectiveness research. Health information technology is changing everything. It would be perverse otherwise: imagine large amounts of data and information either ignored, missed, or collected and then ignored. (shrink)

Recently, the pandemic caused by COVID-19 is severe in the entire world. The prevention and control of crimes associated with COVID-19 are critical for controlling the pandemic. Therefore, to provide efficient and convenient intelligent legal knowledge services during the pandemic, we develop an intelligent system for legal information retrieval on the WeChat platform in this paper. The data source we used for training our system is “The typical cases of national procuratorial authorities handling crimes against the prevention and (...) control of the new coronary pneumonia pandemic following the law”, which is published online by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate of the People’s Republic of China. We base our system on convolutional neural network and use the semantic matching mechanism to capture inter-sentence relationship information and make a prediction. Moreover, we introduce an auxiliary learning process to help the network better distinguish the relation between two sentences. Finally, the system uses the trained model to identify the information entered by a user and responds to the user with a reference case similar to the query case and gives the reference legal gist applicable to the query case. (shrink)

Background: The banking of biological samples raises a number of ethical issues in relation to the storage,export and re-use of samples. Whilst there is a growing body of literature exploringparticipant perspectives in North America and Europe, hardly any studies have been reportedin Africa. This is problematic in particular in light of the growing amount of research takingplace in Africa, and with the rise of biobanking practices also on the African continent. Inorder to investigate the perspectives of African research participants, (...) we conducted a studywith research participants in a TB study in the Western Cape, South Africa. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted using an interview guide which drew on the mostprominent themes expressed in current literature on sample storage, re-use and exportation.Interviews were conducted in Afrikaans and subsequently translated into English by the sameinterviewer. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed qualitatively. Results: The results of our study indicate that the majority of participants were supportive of givingone-time consent to the storage and re-use of their samples. The concept of research being fora "good cause" was a central prerequisite. Additionally, a significant minority requested thatthey be re-contacted if a future use was not stipulated on the original consent. There was alsoconsiderable variation in how participants understood the concept of a 'good cause', withparticipants describing three distinct categories of research, of which two were generallythought to constitute 'good cause' research. Research that was for-profit was considered tofall outside the spectrum of 'good cause' research. Participants displayed confidence in theabilities of the researchers to make future decisions regarding sample use, but seemedunaware of the role of ethics committees in either this process or more generally. Conclusions: Participants expressed a wide and complex range of views about issues of sample storage andre-use, and they showed a great deal of trust in researchers. Participants' willingness to havetheir samples stored and re-used is consistent with findings from existing studies. However,in contrast to existing literature, participants were generally not in favour of for-profitresearch. Further research needs to be done to explore these ideas in other communities, bothin South Africa and other countries. (shrink)

This book offers a reflection on the central role that the ethics of informed consent plays in Rapid Tissue Donation. RTD is an advanced oncology procedure that involves the procurement, for research purposes, of “fresh” tissues within two to six hours of a cancer patient’s death. Since RTD involves the retrieval of tissues after death, and since the collected tissues are of great importance for medical research, the need for any form of informed consent to regulate this procedure has (...) been questioned. This book argues for the necessity of informed consent to govern RTD, and it provides the reader with a bespoke informed consent process applicable to cancer patients. The analysis unfolds at the intersection between applied ethics, public health ethics, and clinical ethics, and it is informed by philosophical theories of informed consent and by the social implications of individual choices. By viewing medical issues relating to informed consent in oncology from an ethical perspective, the book combines philosophical analysis with discussion of concrete cancer-related issues. As a result, the book is suitable for readers interested in ethical reasoning as well as for those with a medical background. It contributes to contemporary research by offering an original analysis that relies on a rigorous philosophical approach to address innovative issues at the cutting edge of medical research and policy making. (shrink)

This paper connects to Jon Bing’s great vision of an integrated national legal information system. The intention of this paper is to variegate Bing’s vision of an integrated information system by shifting the focus to the lay users, thus to those, who are subject to the law. The modified vision is an integrated information system that supports intelligible access to law for the citizens. This presupposes however an unambiguous and transparent legal system. Accordingly, it is also stressed (...) that intelligent legal knowledge engineering has high potential to increase precision and rationality in law, and hence safeguard the predictability of law and legal certainty. The central hypothesis is that putting the person who is subject to the law at the centre provides more rational reason to aim for the greatest possible precision of law by exploiting the means and technologies of our time than to uphold strategic vagueness. On this basis, the paper proposes the development of a basic set of controllable and justiciable basic legal drafting standards on EU and on national level, and promotes a transparency by design approach for legal knowledge engineering in order to enhance precision, integrity, comprehensibility and accessibility of law. Similarly to Jon Bing’s vision, this modified vision of an integrated legal information systems is, most probably, also likely to remain unfulfilled. However, what would science be without visions and (science) fictions? (shrink)

Similar case analysis (SCA) is an essential topic in legal artificial intelligence, serving as a reference for legal professionals. Most existing works treat SCA as a traditional text classification task and ignore some important legal elements that affect the verdict and case similarity, like legal events, and thus are easily misled by semantic structure. To address this issue, we propose a Legal Event-Context Model named LECM to improve the accuracy and interpretability of SCA based on Chinese legal corpus. The event-context (...) integration mechanism, which is an essential component of the LECM, is proposed to integrate the legal event and context information based on the attention mechanism, enabling legal events to be associated with their corresponding relevant contexts. We introduce an event detection module to obtain the legal event information, which is pre-trained on a legal event detection dataset to avoid labeling events manually. We conduct extensive experiments on two SCA tasks, i.e., similar case matching (SCM) and similar case retrieval (SCR). Compared with baseline models, LECM is validated by about 13% and 11% average improvement in terms of mean average precision and accuracy respectively, for SCR and SCM tasks. These results indicate that LECM effectively utilizes event-context knowledge to enhance SCA performance and its potential application in various legal document analysis tasks. (shrink)

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)

Legal Judgment Summarization (LJS) can highly summarize legal judgment documents, improving judicial work efficiency in case retrieval and other occasions. Legal judgment documents are usually lengthy; however, most existing LJS methods are directly based on general text summarization models, which cannot handle long texts effectively. Additionally, due to the complex structural characteristics of legal judgment documents, some information may be lost by applying only one single kind of summarization model. To address these issues, we propose an integrated summarization (...) method which leverages both semantic and structural information to improve the quality of LJS. Specifically, legal judgment documents are firstly segmented into three relatively short parts according to their specific structure. We propose an extractive summarization model named BSLT and an abstractive summarization model named LPGN by adopting Lawformer as the encoder. Lawformer is a new pre-trained language model for long legal documents, which specializes in capturing long-distance dependency and modeling legal semantic features. Then, we adopt different models to summarize the corresponding part regarding its structural characteristics. Finally, the obtained summaries are integrated to generate a high-quality summary involving semantic and structural information. We conduct comparative experiments to evaluate the performance of our model. The results show that our model outperforms the baseline model LEAD-3 by 14.78% on the mean ROUGE score, which demonstrates our method is effective in LJS and is prospected to be applied to assist other tasks in legal artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Background Ethical considerations play a prominent role in the protection of human subjects in clinical research. To date the disclosure of ethical protection in clinical research published in the international nursing journals has not been explored. Our research objective was to investigate the reporting of ethical approval and informed consent in clinical research published in leading international nursing journals. Methods This is a retrospective observational study. All clinical research published in the five leading international nursing journals from the SCI Journal (...) Citation Reports between 2015 and 2017 were retrieved to evaluate for evidence of ethical review. Results A total of 2041 citations have been identified from the contents of all the five leading nursing journals that were published between 2015 and 2017. Out of these, 1284 clinical studies have been included and text relating to ethical review has been extracted. From these, most of prospective clinical studies discussed informed consent. Only half of those reported that written informed consent had been obtained; few reported oral consent, and few used other methods such as online consent or completion and return of data collection to denote assent. Notably, 36.2% of those did not describe the method used to obtain informed consent and merely described that “consent was obtained from participants or participants agreed to join in the research”. Furthermore, whilst most of clinical studies mentioned ethical approval; 92.5% of those stated the name of ethical committee and interestingly, only 37.1% of those mentioned the ethical approval reference. The rates of reporting ethical approval were different between different study type, country, and whether financial support was received. Conclusion The reporting of ethics in leading international nursing journals demonstrates progress, but improvement of the transparency and the standard of ethical reporting in nursing clinical research is required. (shrink)

The taxa that appear in biological classifications are commonly seen as representing information about the traits of their member organisms. This paper examines in what way taxa feature in the storage and retrieval of such information. I will argue that taxa do not actually store much information about the traits of their member organisms. Rather, I want to suggest, taxa should be understood as functioning to localize organisms in the genealogical network of life on Earth. (...) Taxa store information about where organisms are localized in the network, which is important background information when it comes to establishing knowledge about organismal traits, but it is not itself information about these traits. The view of species and higher taxa that is proposed here follows from examining three problems that occur in contemporary biological systematics and are discussed here: the problem of generalization over taxa, the problem of phylogenetic inference, and the problematic nature of the Tree of Life. (shrink)

Legal text retrieval serves as a key component in a wide range of legal text processing tasks such as legal question answering, legal case entailment, and statute law retrieval. The performance of legal text retrieval depends, to a large extent, on the representation of text, both query and legal documents. Based on good representations, a legal text retrieval model can effectively match the query to its relevant documents. Because legal documents often contain long articles and only (...) some parts are relevant to queries, it is quite a challenge for existing models to represent such documents. In this paper, we study the use of attentive neural network-based text representation for statute law document retrieval. We propose a general approach using deep neural networks with attention mechanisms. Based on it, we develop two hierarchical architectures with sparse attention to represent long sentences and articles, and we name them Attentive CNN and Paraformer. The methods are evaluated on datasets of different sizes and characteristics in English, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Experimental results show that: (i) Attentive neural methods substantially outperform non-neural methods in terms of retrieval performance across datasets and languages; (ii) Pretrained transformer-based models achieve better accuracy on small datasets at the cost of high computational complexity while lighter weight Attentive CNN achieves better accuracy on large datasets; and (iii) Our proposed Paraformer outperforms state-of-the-art methods on COLIEE dataset, achieving the highest recall and F2 scores in the top-N retrieval task. (shrink)

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, (...) etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. (shrink)

The number of available legal documents has presented an enormous growth in recent years, and the digital processing of such materials is prompting the necessity of systems that support the automatic relevant information extraction. This work presents a system for ontology-based information extraction from natural language texts, able to identify a set of legal events. The system is based on an innovative methodology based on domain ontology of legal events and a set of linguistic rules, integrated through inference (...) mechanism, resulting in a flexible approach and scalable approach. A case study with the use of documents from the Superior Court in Brazil is related, with satisfactory results in precision and recall. (shrink)

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, (...) which has recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

Background:In research on co-creation in nursing, a caring manner can be used to create opportunities whereby the patient’s quality of life can be increased in palliative home care. This can be described as an ethical cornerstone and the goal of palliative care. To promote quality of life, nurses must be sensitive to patients’ and their relatives’ needs in care encounters. Co-creation can be defined as the joint creation of vital goals for patients through the process of shared knowledge between nurses, (...) patients and their relatives.Aim:The aim of this study was to explore nurses’ experiences of caring encounters and co-creation in palliative home care from an ethical perspective.Research design, participants, and research context:A hermeneutical approach was used. The material consisted of texts from interviews with 12 nurses in a home care context. The method was inspired by thematic analysis.Ethical considerations:Informed consent was sought from the participants regarding study participation and the storage and handling of data for research purposes.Findings:An overall theme, a main theme and four sub-themes emerged. Through ethical sensitivity and perceptivity, nurses can balance their actions in the moment and change their nursing care actions according to the patient’s wishes through co-creation in encounters. Here the time is crucial, as the time needed is unique to each patient.Discussion:The themes together can be considered prerequisites for good palliative home care. If nurses fail to be sensitive and perceptive in encounters with dying patients, good palliative home care cannot be achieved. Ethical sensitivity and perceptiveness can also be considered a part of nurses’ ethical competence.Conclusion:Patients’ dignity can be preserved through ethical sensitivity and perceptiveness, which is fundamental for good palliative care. Co-creation from patients’ perspectives should be the focus of future research. (shrink)

The cosmetics, detergents and food industries trial development products using healthy human volunteer studies. They also use human tissue for in vitro investigations. Hitherto, the ethics of such work has not been regulated. The UK Human Tissue Act will have legal implications on current arrangements for such studies within the industry, especially with regards to informed consent and seeking ethical review of research proposals. At present, however, it is unclear who will fund ethical review for use of ‘relevant material’ in (...) non-medical research, and on the required status of ethics committees to review such work. The principles behind the sampling, storage and processing of ‘relevant material’ are largely identical whether it be for medical or non-medical investigations. It is argued, therefore, that this is further justification for industry and professional bodies to adopt best practice of ethical review for all studies in ‘grey areas’ outside the scope of regulations. This would follow closely those standards applied to biomedical research. (shrink)

The first reported case of postmortem sperm retrieval occurred in 1978, involving a man who became brain dead after a motor vehicle accident and whose wife requested removal of his sperm so that she could be artificially inseminated. Physicians performed the retrieval by surgically excising the ducts that transport sperm from the testes and removing sperm from them. Since that time, several other methods for retrieving sperm from such patients have been reported, and at least 141 cases have (...) been documented in which requests were made for removal of sperm from men who were dead or irreversibly unconscious. Moreover, there have been several reports of pregnancies and births resulting from assisted reproduction using sperm retrieved in such cases. (shrink)

Court judgments contain valuable information on how statutory laws and past court precedents are interpreted and how the interdependence structure among them evolves in the courtroom. Data-mining the evolving structure of such customs and norms that reflect myriad social values from a large-scale court judgment corpus is an essential task from both the academic and industrial perspectives. In this paper, using data from approximately 110,000 court judgments from Japan spanning the period 1998–2018 from the district to the supreme court (...) level, we propose two tasks that grasp such a structure from court judgments and highlight the strengths and weaknesses of major machine learning models. One is a prediction task based on masked language modeling that connects textual information to legal codes and past court precedents. Another is a dynamic link prediction task where we predict the hidden interdependence structure in the law. We make quantitative and qualitative comparisons among major machine learning models to obtain insights for future developments. (shrink)

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on nine significant papers drawn from the Journal’s second decade. Four of the papers relate to reasoning with legal cases, introducing contextual considerations, predicting outcomes on the basis of natural language descriptions of the cases, comparing different ways of representing cases, and formalising precedential reasoning. One introduces a method of analysing arguments that was to become very widely used in AI and Law, namely (...) argumentation schemes. Two relate to ontologies for the representation of legal concepts and two take advantage of the increasing availability of legal corpora in this decade, to automate document summarisation and for the mining of arguments. (shrink)

Ex aequo et bono compensations refer to tribunal’s compensations that cannot be determined exactly according to the rule of law, in which case the judge relies on an estimate that seems fair for the case at hand. Such cases are prone to legal uncertainty, given the subjectivity that is inherent to the concept of fairness. We show how basic principles from statistics and machine learning may be used to reduce legal uncertainty in ex aequo et bono judicial decisions. For a (...) given type of ex aequo et bono dispute, we consider two general stages in estimating the compensation. First, the stage where there is significant disagreement among judges as to which compensation is fair. In that case, we let judges rule on such disputes, while a machine tracks a certain measure of the relative differences of the granted compensations. In the second stage that measure, which expresses the degree of legal uncertainty, has dropped below a predefined threshold. From then on legal decisions on the quantity of the ex aequo et bono compensation for the considered type of dispute may be replaced by the average of previous compensations. The main consequence is that this type of dispute is, from this stage on, free of legal uncertainty. (shrink)

This paper adopts Hadoop to build and test the storage and retrieval platform for painting resources. This paper adopts Hadoop as the platform and MapReduce as the computing framework and uses Hadoop Distributed Filesystem distributed file system to store massive log data, which solves the storage problem of massive data. According to the business requirements of the system, this paper designs the system according to the process of web text mining, mainly divided into log data preprocessing module, (...) log data storage module, log data analysis module, and log data visualization module. The core part of the system is the log data analysis module. The analysis of search keywords ranking, Uniform Resource Locator, and user click relationship, URL ranking, and other dimensions are realized through data statistical analysis, and Canopy coarse clustering is performed first according to search keywords, and then K-means clustering is used for the results after Canopy clustering, and the calculation of cosine similarity is adopted to realize the grouping of users and build user portrait. The Hadoop development environment is installed and deployed, and functional and performance tests are conducted on the contents implemented in this system. The constructed private cloud platform for remote sensing image data can realize online retrieval of remote sensing image metadata and fast download of remote sensing image data and solve the problems in storage, data sharing, and management of remote sensing image data to a certain extent. (shrink)

The taxa that appear in biological classifications are commonly seen as representing information about the traits of their member organisms. This paper examines in what way taxa feature in the storage and retrieval of such information. I will argue that taxa do not actually store much information about the traits of their member organisms. Rather, I want to suggest, taxa should be understood as functioning to localize organisms in the genealogical network of life on Earth. (...) Taxa store information about where organisms are localized in the network, which is important background information when it comes to establishing knowledge about organismal traits, but it is not itself information about these traits. The view of species and higher taxa that is proposed here follows from examining three problems that occur in contemporary biological systematics and are discussed here: the problem of generalization over taxa, the problem of phylogenetic inference, and the problematic nature of the Tree of Life. (shrink)

Supporters of opt‐in organ procurement policies typically claim that the absence of consent to postmortem transplantable organ retrieval is a normative barrier to such retrieval. On this ground, justification of opt‐out policies is demanded. The paper shows that postmortem organ retrieval is normatively different from live organ removal, and so the doctrine of informed consent does not apply to it in the way it does in other types of cases. First, seen as the instrument of protection of (...) autonomy or the right to self‐determination, informed consent cannot be relied on in the case of dead persons; secondly, viewed as an instrument of annulment of harm or wrong to the dead (volenti non fit injuria), informed consent relies on indefensible accounts of posthumous harm or wrong. Postmortem organ retrieval in cases of absence of the decedent's consent and refusal is governed by other norms than those related to consent. Such norms include, among others, respectful treatment of human remains (such as those found in regulations of medicine, law enforcement, and research) and avoidance of inherently wrong contexts and purposes (such as killing for the purpose of organ retrieval or trade in the human body or its parts). It is concluded that the onus probandi is on the supporters of opt‐in, rather than opt‐out, policies of posthumous organ retrieval. (shrink)

In an era characterized by fast technological progress that introduces new unpredictable scenarios every day, working in the law field may appear very difficult, if not supported by the right tools. In this respect, some systems based on Artificial Intelligence methods have been proposed in the literature, to support several tasks in the legal sector. Following this line of research, in this paper we propose a novel method, called PRILJ, that identifies paragraph regularities in legal case judgments, to support legal (...) experts during the redaction of legal documents. Methodologically, PRILJ adopts a two-step approach that first groups documents into clusters, according to their semantic content, and then identifies regularities in the paragraphs for each cluster. Embedding-based methods are adopted to properly represent documents and paragraphs into a semantic numerical feature space, and an Approximated Nearest Neighbor Search method is adopted to efficiently retrieve the most similar paragraphs with respect to the paragraphs of a document under preparation. Our extensive experimental evaluation, performed on a real-world dataset provided by EUR-Lex, proves the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed method. In particular, its ability of modeling different topics of legal documents, as well as of capturing the semantics of the textual content, appear very beneficial for the considered task, and make PRILJ very robust to the possible presence of noise in the data. (shrink)