Call for Papers: ASAIL 2025 (7th Workshop on Automated Semantic Analysis of Information in Legal Text)

[Jack Mumford]

Paper submission deadline: May 6, 2025 (AoE)

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/asail/asail-2025-call-for-papers

The Seventh Workshop on Automated Semantic Analysis of Information in Legal Texts (ASAIL) will be held online in conjunction with the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2025). It is a continuation of the successful prior ASAIL workshops at ICAIL and JURIX.

The workshop will explore the application of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques to the semantic analysis of legal texts, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars, researchers, legal practitioners, and service providers. Semantic analysis, which links linguistic structures to domain-specific meanings, is critical for processing legal information effectively. The range of focal texts includes:

• Statutes, regulations, and court-made pronouncements of legal rules embodying legal norms;
• Textual arguments in legal case decisions interpreting legal norms and applying them in concrete fact situations;
• Legislative and policy-based debates concerning proposed legal norms, their purpose and meaning;
• Actual and proposed contracts that need to be analyzed for the permissions and obligations they encode and their consistency with organisational preferences or legal frameworks;
• Technical reports and other evidentiary documents;
• Court testimony and narrative texts in submissions by self-represented parties.

 

Covered Topics

• Advances in automated semantic analysis of legal texts, including integration of state-of-the-art ML techniques such as LLMs (large language models), foundation models, and transfer learning. 
• Adaptation and fine-tuning of NLP tools for the unique characteristics of legal texts, including multilingual and cross-jurisdictional analysis. 
• Automated or semi-automated extraction of legal norms and principles from textual sources. 
• Argument mining from court case documentation, legislative records, legal policy debates. 
• Extraction and evaluation of fact-finding reasoning and precedent alignment from case decisions. 
• Applications of advanced linguistic theories, including pragmatics and discourse analysis, to improve legal NLP tools. 
• Development of user-friendly annotation environments for training and validating AI systems on legal texts. 
• Innovations in summarisation, visualisation, and retrieval for legal texts, including systems tailored for diverse legal traditions and multilingual corpora. 
• Automated translation of legal text into formal or abstract representations to support reasoning and decision-making. 
• Advances in XAI (explainable AI) and human-AI interaction with specific applications to legal NLP, focusing on transparency, fairness, and bias mitigation. 

 

Papers Solicited

We invite papers written in English on, and demonstrations of, original work on the above listed and other aspects of automated detection, extraction and analysis of semantic information in legal texts. We accept:

• Full research papers (10 pages in the approved style plus bibliography); 
• Short papers (6 pages in the approved style plus bibliography).

 

Important Dates

• Submissions due: May 6, 2025 (AoE)
• Notification of acceptance: May 24, 2025
• Camera-Ready Papers due: June 1, 2025

 

Venue

The workshop will be held for a full-day on Monday 16th June in conjunction with ICAIL 2025, at the Northwestern University, Chicago, USA. The workshop will be organised with hybrid in-person and remote participation available. At least one author per accepted paper is expected to register and attend in person (although remote presentation is available).

Organising Committee

• Francesca Lagioia, European University Institute and University of Bologna, Italy
• Jack Mumford, University of Liverpool, UK (chair)
• Hannes Westermann, Maastricht University, Netherlands 

Advisory Board

• Kevin D. Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK
• Enrico Francesconi, Italian National Research Council (IGSG-CNR) and European Parliament, Italy
• Matthias Grabmair, Technical University of Munich, Germany
• Jaromír Šavelka, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Vern R. Walker, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, USA
• Bernhard Waltl, BMW Group AG, Germany
• Adam Wyner, Swansea University, UK

Contact: Dr Jack Mumford: jack.m...@liverpool.ac.uk