Prof. Guido Boella and Matteo Baldoni
1. Normative multiagent systems. Multiagent systems are a distributed form of software where heterogeneous and autonomous entities called agents interact with each other to achieve the goals of the humans they are acting on behalf of (e.g., in e-commerce). To regulate such systems metaphors like norms and sanctions have been imported from law. Normative multiagent systems thus have an explicit computable representation of norms and are able to reason on those representations. Basic notions of multiagent systems will be illustrated together with the use of legal knowledge representation and reasoning techniques in this domain.
2. Legal Knowledge representation. Ontologies are a form of knowledge representation formalism which is often used in legal domains to make legal content machine processable. Basic concepts of ontologies, their logical formalization and the use in the legal domain will be illustrated together with the possible applications of legal ontologies in the semantic web.
3. Technologies for natural language processing on legal texts: Information retrieval, legal document databases, text indexing, classification and summarization, e-discovery, legal thesauri.