[Colloq] **Colloquium** Thursday, April 11, 149CN 10:30am

[Rachel Bates]

Computer Science Colloquium

      Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Management and Machine Learning
	                 in the Legal Domain.

			   Dr. John Zeleznikow
        Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic Statistics and Legal Reasoning,
	           University of Edinburgh, Scotland

                       Thursday, April 11, 10:30 a.m.
			  Room 149 Cullinane Hall

There has been minimal research about knowledge discovery in the legal
domain.
We claim for knowledge discovery to be feasible, the domain must contain an
abundance of commonplace cases.  We discuss in detail a hybrid rule-based/
neural network system, Split_Up which provides advice upon the distribution
of property following divorce in Australia.  Explanations in Split_Up are
provided using the argumentation theory of Stephen Toulmin.

Toulmin's theory of argumentation has been used to build a knowledge
management shell which can be used by domain experts to build legal
knowledge
based system. Examples have been constructed in the domains of: computer
copyright; sentencing of criminals; granting of legal aid; family
law and refugee law. In conjunction with Victoria Legal Aid we have been
developing techniques for placing legal decision support systems on the
world wide web.  We describe a Knowledge Management shell WebShell which we
have developed to help with our task.  We conclude by discussing how our
research has been used in bioinformatics and law.

Dr. John Zeleznikow is the Director of the Centre for Forensic Statistics
and Legal Reasoning, University of Edinburgh. Previously he was the Director
of the Donald Berman Centre for Information Technology and Law at Latrobe
University in Melbourne Australia. He is the author of numerous articles
on databases, intelligent systems and machine learning, and co-author of the
book: Zeleznikow, J. and Hunter, D., 1994, Building Intelligent Legal
Information Systems: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Law,
Kluwer Computer/Law series.