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Legal Debugging in Propositional Legal Representation

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New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (JSAI-isAI 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11717))

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Abstract

Literal interpretation on laws may produce unexpected consequences. They are difficult to be recognized unless exceptional cases were taken to the court. The court may decide a literal interpretation as exceptional, and then they have to identify which rule is a source of exception.

To assist the court, we proposed an idea called legal debugging, to find out which rule condition, called a culprit, causes unexpected consequences in such exceptional cases. We adapt the algorithmic program debugging with consideration of characteristics in reasoning in judgement, such as non-recursive stratified structures and factual propositions in order to find a culprit at last.

This paper presents legal debugging in propositional Prolog as well as PROLEG (PROlog based LEGal reasoning support system) specialized for legal reasoning. An example of legal debugging that interacts with a user and finds a culprit is also shown under the PROLEG representation of the case adapted from the real Supreme Court case.

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Acknowledgement

We appreciate Randy Goebel, Oliver Ray, and Tiago Oliveira for their comments on the paper. This research is partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant No. 17H06103.

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Correspondence to Wachara Fungwacharakorn .

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Fungwacharakorn, W., Satoh, K. (2019). Legal Debugging in Propositional Legal Representation. In: Kojima, K., Sakamoto, M., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11717. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_12

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