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The First Workshop on
Artificial Intelligence for Access to Justice (AI4AJ 2023) will be held in
conjunction with the 19th
International Conference on AI and Law (ICAIL 2023) on Monday, 19 June 2023 in Braga, Portugal.
Schedule
The AI4AJ 2023 workshop schedule and proceedings are now available.
Background
“Equality under the law” is enshrined in Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but in practice equality under the law is often elusive for moderate-income and poor individuals. Those who can’t afford an attorney are at a disadvantage as compared to those represented by counsel and often disproportionately burden courts, agencies, and other institutions that must adjudicate their claims or defenses.
Used appropriately, AI technology has the potential to reduce the disadvantages of self-representation by intermediating between litigants and rule-governed institutions, e.g.,
- Informing litigants of their rights and obligations and of the procedures required to assert those rights and meet those obligations.
- Assisting litigants in understanding, drafting, and filing documents
- Providing alternative dispute resolution mechanisms to reduce the burden of adjudication and the importance of legal representation.
- Eliciting, interpreting, summarizing, and transcribing narratives and other legally relevant facts from litigants.
- Predicting the likelihood of success of a claim given a litigant’s textual expression of the relevant facts.
- Explaining to a claimant why a claim is likely to, or did in fact, succeed or fail
- Assisting decision making bodies such as courts and tribunals in improving their efficiency and consistency in handling large volumes of cases with limited resources.
- Determining, and adapting to, the knowledge, goals,
education, culture, language, and emotional state of the
litigant.
This abundance of potential AI applications to improve access to justice gives rise to a corresponding variety of pragmatic and research issues.
Workshop Description
The intended audience for the workshop includes practitioners,
researchers, and developers working to employ technology to improve
access to justice. The workshop is intended be accessible to
attorneys, computer scientists, legal aid workers, and social
scientists. The workshop will address technological innovations
intended improve access to justice and delivery of services and
benefits to citizens and reduction of risks created by such technology, including
the due-process, bias, and privacy concerns that can arise from
automated support of self-represented litigants. It will also examine
human-computer interface issues concerning how and when
self-represented litigants (SRLs) should use AI
systems.
Participation is invited on all topics relevant to these research themes, including:
- Needs and opportunities – how research activities should be prioritized, given the world-wide dimensions of the crisis in access to justice.
- Assistive task analysis and explication – formalizing the requirements for assistance to self-represented litigants.
- User experience, including evaluation criteria and user modeling
- Key technology developments and challenges – principled models for interactive systems based on usability analysis, formalisation, and validation of the legal underpinnings of systems, narrative elicitation and analysis, multi-modal interfaces, etc.
- The pragmatics of promoting adoption and overcoming institutional barriers, tool hosting,
- User modeling and human-factors analysis to improve comprehension and usability
- Risks of AI systems for self-represented litigants
- Generative AI and Large Language Models to improve access to justice
Workshop Format
The workshop will be one full day, consisting of exchanges of information
concerning recent research and applications. Sessions will be in the following formats:
- Panel discussions. Panelists will each make a short statement or presentation topic, then participate in a moderated discussion involving panelists and the audience.
- Short technical or position presentations. Each presenter will make a brief presentation, then participate in a short, moderated discussion with the workshop participants intended to provide rapid feedback. Presentations will be selected by the program committee from short position or research paper submissions.
- Long presentations. Presentations of mature research projects selected from submissions by the program committee.
- Demos. Each presenter will make a short demo, then answer questions from the audience concerning implementation, availability, evaluation, validation, etc.
- Guided discussion. For issues appropriate for collective decision making, such as setting research priorities, a moderator will lead the participants in group problem-solving activity, such as an Open Card Sort.
- Invited speakers.
- Works in Progress. Presentations of ideas for papers in early stages and gather feedback to assist in further development of the progjects. This may be especially helpful for scholars early in their careers.
Remote Participation
While in-person participation is encouraged, online participation is
permissible for those who have a one-day registration for June 19 or
who have registered for the entire ICAIL conference.
Publications
The workshop will be structured to accommodate both those who wish to present research or position papers and those wish instead to engage in discussions of positions that have not yet been formally expressed as a paper. If there are sufficient research or position paper submissions, the workshop organizers will undertake to arrange a special issue of a journal so that those papers can be published.
Submission Information
Participants are invited to submit demo proposals, technical or
position papers, or statements of interest specifying research
activities and goals.
All papers should be converted to PDF prior to electronic
submission. All submissions should be through Easychair at
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ai4aj23. Each paper should be
labeled as a demo proposal, technical or position paper, or statement
of interest. Technical and position papers should be limited to 10 pages including references.
Important Dates
Deadlines Extended
17 April 2023 28 April 2023: Submissions due (demo proposals, short position and research papers, full research summaries)
1 May 2023 15 May 2023: Notification of Acceptance
5 June 2023: Revised manuscripts due
19 June 2023: Workshop Date
Program Committee
Karl Branting, The MITRE Corporation, lbranting@mitre.org
John Zeleznikow, La Trobe University and University of Granada, john.zeleznikow@vu.edu.au
Amy Schmitz, The Ohio State University, Schmitz.220@osu.edu
Marc Lauritsen, Capstone Practice Systems, marc@capstonepractice.com
Hannes Westermann, University of Montreal, hannes.westermann@umontreal.ca
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