Hybrid Artificial Intelligence to Extract Patterns and Rules from Argumentative and Legal Texts

This Thesis is composed of a collection of works written in the period 2019-2022, whose aim is to find methodologies of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to detect and classify patterns and rules in argumentative and legal texts. We define our approach “hybrid”, since we aimed at designing hybrid combinations of symbolic and sub-symbolic AI, involving both “top-down” structured knowledge and “bottom-up” data-driven knowledge. A first group of works is dedicated to the classification of argumentative patterns. Following the Waltonian model of argument and the related theory of Argumentation Schemes, these works focused on the detection of argumentative support and opposition, showing that argumentative evidences can be classified at fine-grained levels without resorting to highly engineered features. To show this, our methods involved not only traditional approaches such as TFIDF, but also some novel methods based on Tree Kernel algorithms. After the encouraging results of this first phase, we explored the use of a some emerging methodologies promoted by actors like Google, which have deeply changed NLP since 2018-19 — i.e., Transfer Learning and language models. These new methodologies markedly improved our previous results, providing us with best-performing NLP tools. Using Transfer Learning, we also performed a Sequence Labelling task to recognize the exact span of argumentative components (i.e., claims and premises), thus connecting portions of natural language to portions of arguments (i.e., to the logical-inferential dimension). The last part of our work was finally dedicated to the employment of Transfer Learning methods for the detection of rules and deontic modalities. In this case, we explored a hybrid approach which combines structured knowledge coming from two LegalXML formats (i.e., Akoma Ntoso and LegalRuleML) with sub-symbolic knowledge coming from pre-trained (and then fine-tuned) neural architectures.

AI and legal personhood: a theoretical survey

I set out the pros and cons of conferring legal personhood on artificial intelligence systems (AIs), mainly under civil law. I provide functionalist arguments to justify this policy choice and identify the content that such a legal status might have. Although personhood entails holding one or more legal positions, I will focus on the distribution of liabilities arising from unpredictably illegal and harmful conduct. Conferring personhood on AIs might efficiently allocate risks and social costs, ensuring protection for victims, incentives for production, and technological innovation. I also consider other legal positions, e.g., the capacity to act, the ability to hold property, make contracts, and sue (and be sued). However, I contend that even assuming that conferring personhood on AIs finds widespread consensus, its implementation requires solving a coordination problem, determined by three asymmetries: technological, intra-legal systems, and inter-legal systems. I address the coordination problem through conceptual analysis and metaphysical explanation. I first frame legal personhood as a node of inferential links between factual preconditions and legal effects. Yet, this inferentialist reading does not account for the ‘background reasons’, i.e., it does not explain why we group divergent situations under legal personality and how extra-legal information is integrated into it. One way to account for this background is to adopt a neo-institutional perspective and update its ontology of legal concepts with further layers: the meta-institutional and the intermediate. Under this reading, the semantic referent of legal concepts is institutional reality. So, I use notions of analytical metaphysics, such as grounding and anchoring, to explain the origins and constituent elements of legal personality as an institutional kind. Finally, I show that the integration of conceptual and metaphysical analysis can provide the toolkit for finding an equilibrium around the legal-policy choices that are involved in including (or not including) AIs among legal persons.

Birth, Development and Progressive Institutionalization of the Ombudsman in the Russian Legal and Political System

One of the current trends in governance and legal development in Russia is aimed at establishing a modern, efficient and internationally harmonised system of safeguards of human rights and civil liberties. A fairly recent addition to this system has been the institution of ombudsman as a public authority specialised in promoting and protecting human rights and civil liberties. The introduction of this institution as well as its formalisation at the constitutional and legislative levels has been increasingly relevant and important, as it raises the dealings between the state and the individual to a new level. As an independent public institution resolving conflicts between citizens and government authorities, the ombudsman makes steps, within the scope of his jurisdiction, to restitute individual rights, and helps to enhance the reputation of government. The present work describes and assesses the birth, development and institutionalization process of the Ombudsman Office in the Russian Federation, at federal and regional levels, with a particular emphasis on the role of international references and cooperation for institution building. Ombudsmen have done a magnificent job in demonstrating value with the resolution of individual and systemic complaints; subsequent improvements to government; and economic savings by mitigating litigation costs.

Gender equality and human development in Macedonia during transition (1991-2006)

The present thesis treats the issue of gender equality in Macedonia during the period of transition from the socialist system to the one of parliamentary democracy. The main aim is to mainstream the gender perspective in the analysis of the transitional policies through the examination of the basic citizenship rights to which citizens are entitled and by the means of the evaluation of their capabilities to exercise these rights. Gender equality, as one of the main strongholds of the concept of human development is measured through the application of nine gender relevant capabilities in a Case study conducted within selected municipalities in the country. Through the analysis of the Macedonian constitutional and legal framework and the assessment of gender based inequalities, the research questions the need for the enactment of a process of engendering of citizenship, which would integrate gender based differences, contemplate the private sphere of citizens lives and pledge participation in the political life of the country. The thesis, finally, analyses the gender equality strategy of the Macedonian government with the purpose to evaluate whether it is context based, i.e. it tackles the main fields where inequalities emerge and in this context whether it envisages a process of engendering of citizenship.

An interdisciplinary analysis of obesity: theory and empirical evidence

The dissertation is structured in three parts. The first part compares US and EU agricultural policies since the end of WWII. There is not enough evidence for claiming that agricultural support has a negative impact on obesity trends. I discuss the possibility of an exchange in best practices to fight obesity. There are relevant economic, societal and legal differences between the US and the EU. However, partnerships against obesity are welcomed. The second part presents a socio-ecological model of the determinants of obesity. I employ an interdisciplinary model because it captures the simultaneous influence of several variables. Obesity is an interaction of pre-birth, primary and secondary socialization factors. To test the significance of each factor, I use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health. I compare the average body mass index across different populations. Differences in means are statistically significant. In the last part I use the National Survey of Children Health. I analyze the effect that family characteristics, built environment, cultural norms and individual factors have on the body mass index (BMI). I use Ordered Probit models and I calculate the marginal effects. I use State and ethnicity fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity. I find that southern US States tend have on average a higher probability of being obese. On the ethnicity side, White Americans have a lower BMI respect to Black Americans, Hispanics and American Indians Native Islanders; being Asian is associated with a lower probability of being obese. In neighborhoods where trust level and safety perception are higher, children are less overweight and obese. Similar results are shown for higher level of parental income and education. Breastfeeding has a negative impact. Higher values of measures of behavioral disorders have a positive and significant impact on obesity, as predicted by the theory.

Interpreting Judgements using Knowledge Representation Methods and Computational Models of Argument

The goal of the present research is to define a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, by using knowledge extracted from text, metadata, and rules, while maintaining a strong text-to-knowledge morphism between legal text and legal concepts, in order to fill the gap between legal document and its semantics. The framework is composed of four different models that make use of standard languages from the Semantic Web stack of technologies: a document metadata structure, modelling the main parts of a judgement, and creating a bridge between a text and its semantic annotations of legal concepts; a legal core ontology, modelling abstract legal concepts and institutions contained in a rule of law; a legal domain ontology, modelling the main legal concepts in a specific domain concerned by case-law; an argumentation system, modelling the structure of argumentation. The input to the framework includes metadata associated with judicial concepts, and an ontology library representing the structure of case-law. The research relies on the previous efforts of the community in the field of legal knowledge representation and rule interchange for applications in the legal domain, in order to apply the theory to a set of real legal documents, stressing the OWL axioms definitions as much as possible in order to enable them to provide a semantically powerful representation of the legal document and a solid ground for an argumentation system using a defeasible subset of predicate logics. It appears that some new features of OWL2 unlock useful reasoning features for legal knowledge, especially if combined with defeasible rules and argumentation schemes. The main task is thus to formalize legal concepts and argumentation patterns contained in a judgement, with the following requirement: to check, validate and reuse the discourse of a judge - and the argumentation he produces - as expressed by the judicial text.

The twofold role of Cloud Computing in Digital Forensics: target of investigations and helping hand to evidence analysis

This PhD thesis discusses the impact of Cloud Computing infrastructures on Digital Forensics in the twofold role of target of investigations and as a helping hand to investigators. The Cloud offers a cheap and almost limitless computing power and storage space for data which can be leveraged to commit either new or old crimes and host related traces. Conversely, the Cloud can help forensic examiners to find clues better and earlier than traditional analysis applications, thanks to its dramatically improved evidence processing capabilities. In both cases, a new arsenal of software tools needs to be made available. The development of this novel weaponry and its technical and legal implications from the point of view of repeatability of technical assessments is discussed throughout the following pages and constitutes the unprecedented contribution of this work

The Determinants of Individual Performance: Empirical Essays on the Importance of Soft Skills and Monetary Incentives

This dissertation consists of three papers. The first paper "Managing the Workload: an Experiment on Individual Decision Making and Performance" experimentally investigates how decision-making in workload management affects individual performance. I designed a laboratory experiment in order to exogenously manipulate the schedule of work faced by each subject and to identify its impact on final performance. Through the mouse click-tracking technique, I also collected interesting behavioral measures on organizational skills. I found that a non-negligible share of individuals performs better under externally imposed schedules than in the unconstrained case. However, such constraints are detrimental for those good in self-organizing. The second chapter, "On the allocation of effort with multiple tasks and piecewise monotonic hazard function", tests the optimality of a scheduling model, proposed in a different literature, for the decisional problem faced in the experiment. Under specific assumptions, I find that such model identifies what would be the optimal scheduling of the tasks in the Admission Test. The third paper "The Effects of Scholarships and Tuition Fees Discounts on Students' Performances: Which Monetary Incentives work Better?" explores how different levels of monetary incentives affect the achievement of students in tertiary education. I used a Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit the assignment of different monetary incentives, to study the effects of such liquidity provision on performance outcomes, ceteris paribus. The results show that a monetary increase in the scholarships generates no effect on performance since the achievements of the recipients are all centered near the requirements for non-returning the benefit. Secondly, students, who are actually paying some share of the total cost of college attendance, surprisingly, perform better than those whose cost is completely subsidized. A lower benefit, relatively to a higher aid, it motivates students to finish early and not to suffer the extra cost of a delayed graduation.

Essays in the Economics of the Family and Cultural Transmission

My research aims at identifying the role cultural-ethnic traits play in marriage choices and at uncovering the implications of marital sorting on consequent intra-household decisions. From different perspectives, this thesis focuses on intermarriages, within the Italian marriage market. In the first chapter, I explore the role of ethnic endogamy on marital instability. I document the existence of a positive differential in marital instability of interethnic marriages compared to homogeneous ones and I demonstrate that genetic and ethnolinguistic measures of cultural diversity are informative about the incidence of marital dissolution. The second chapter investigates a novel channel, which explains the differential in household stability and investments across family types: cultural socialization of children. I propose a marital matching model along cultural-ethnic lines, to study the process of family formation and intra-household decision making in a context where ethnic differences between spouses potentially matter both in terms of preferences and technologies for household production. The observed intermarriage, fertility, separation and socialization rates are in line with theoretical predictions and they are consistent with strong preferences of parents toward cultural socialization of children to their own ethnic identity. In the third chapter, I propose and estimate a marital matching model along ethnic lines. I argue that gains to intermarriage depend on both cultural preferences and legal status motives. Taking advantage of the exogenous EU enlargements to East European countries in 2004 and 2007, I show that gains to intermarriage of East European migrants significantly decrease in response to the acquisition of the legal status. The final chapter aims to understand whether judicial decisions respond to the ethnic identity of spouses and what incentives those judgments are guided, by looking at separation and divorce sentences. Studying the legal custody assignment of children, I document a significant differential interacting mothers’ ethnicities with the family type.

Methods and tools for analysis and management of risks and regulatory compliance in the healthcare sector: the hospital at home – HaH

Changing or creating an organisation means creating a new process. Each process involves many risks that need to be identified and managed. The main risks considered here are procedural and legal risks. The former are related to the risks of errors that may occur during processes, while the latter are related to the compliance of processes with regulations. Managing the risks implies proposing changes to the processes that allow the desired result: an optimised process. In order to manage a company and optimise it in the best possible way, not only should the organisational aspect, risk management and legal compliance be taken into account, but it is important that they are all analysed simultaneously with the aim of finding the right balance that satisfies them all. This is the aim of this thesis, to provide methods and tools to balance these three characteristics, and to enable this type of optimisation, ICT support is used. This work isn’t a thesis in computer science or law, but rather an interdisciplinary thesis. Most of the work done so far is vertical and in a specific domain. The particularity and aim of this thesis is not to carry out an in-depth analysis of a particular aspect, but rather to combine several important aspects, normally analysed separately, which however have an impact and influence each other. In order to carry out this kind of interdisciplinary analysis, the knowledge base of both areas was involved and the combination and collaboration of different experts in the various fields was necessary. Although the methodology described is generic and can be applied to all sectors, the case study considered is a new type of healthcare service that allows patients in acute disease to be hospitalised to their home. This provide the possibility to perform experiments using real hospital database.

Internet of things: legal liability of IoE devices in the home

This thesis is about the smart home, a connected ambience that will help consumers to live a more environmentally sustainable life and will help vulnerable categories of consumers to live a more autonomous life, thanks to the pervasive use of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. In particular, civil liability for the malfunctioning of the smart home is the filter through which the research is carried out. I analyse whether the actual legal liability rules are ready or not to adapt to this new connected environment, such as the IoT-powered smart home. Through careful mapping of the technical and legal state of the art, the thesis argues that the EU rules on product liability contained in the Product Liability Directive (PLD) will apply consistently to these objects. This holds true even if at the time of the drafting of the thesis, the proposal on the update of the PLD had not been published yet. Through the analysis of past PLD cases, new American products liability case-law on domestic IoT objects and the latest legal scholarship’s contributions and policy inputs it was possible to anticipate some of the contents of the newly published EU PLD Update proposal.

Governing algorithms in the big data era for balancing new digital rights - designing GDPR compliant and trustworthy XAI systems

This thesis investigates the legal, ethical, technical, and psychological issues of general data processing and artificial intelligence practices and the explainability of AI systems. It consists of two main parts. In the initial section, we provide a comprehensive overview of the big data processing ecosystem and the main challenges we face today. We then evaluate the GDPR’s data privacy framework in the European Union. The Trustworthy AI Framework proposed by the EU’s High-Level Expert Group on AI (AI HLEG) is examined in detail. The ethical principles for the foundation and realization of Trustworthy AI are analyzed along with the assessment list prepared by the AI HLEG. Then, we list the main big data challenges the European researchers and institutions identified and provide a literature review on the technical and organizational measures to address these challenges. A quantitative analysis is conducted on the identified big data challenges and the measures to address them, which leads to practical recommendations for better data processing and AI practices in the EU. In the subsequent part, we concentrate on the explainability of AI systems. We clarify the terminology and list the goals aimed at the explainability of AI systems. We identify the reasons for the explainability-accuracy trade-off and how we can address it. We conduct a comparative cognitive analysis between human reasoning and machine-generated explanations with the aim of understanding how explainable AI can contribute to human reasoning. We then focus on the technical and legal responses to remedy the explainability problem. In this part, GDPR’s right to explanation framework and safeguards are analyzed in-depth with their contribution to the realization of Trustworthy AI. Then, we analyze the explanation techniques applicable at different stages of machine learning and propose several recommendations in chronological order to develop GDPR-compliant and Trustworthy XAI systems.

Influencable autonomy and predictable freedom in the IoE

This thesis investigates how individuals can develop, exercise, and maintain autonomy and freedom in the presence of information technology. It is particularly interested in how information technology can impose autonomy constraints. The first part identifies a problem with current autonomy discourse: There is no agreed upon object of reference when bemoaning loss of or risk to an individual’s autonomy. Here, thesis introduces a pragmatic conceptual framework to classify autonomy constraints. In essence, the proposed framework divides autonomy in three categories: intrinsic autonomy, relational autonomy and informational autonomy. The second part of the thesis investigates the role of information technology in enabling and facilitating autonomy constraints. The analysis identifies eleven characteristics of information technology, as it is embedded in society, so-called vectors of influence, that constitute risk to an individual’s autonomy in a substantial way. These vectors are assigned to three sets that correspond to the general sphere of the information transfer process to which they can be attributed to, namely domain-specific vectors, agent-specific vectors and information recipient-specific vectors. The third part of the thesis investigates selected ethical and legal implications of autonomy constraints imposed by information technology. It shows the utility of the theoretical frameworks introduced earlier in the thesis when conducting an ethical analysis of autonomy-constraining technology. It also traces the concept of autonomy in the European Data Lawsand investigates the impact of cultural embeddings of individuals on efforts to safeguard autonomy, showing intercultural flashpoints of autonomy differences. In view of this, the thesis approaches the exercise and constraint of autonomy in presence of information technology systems holistically. It contributes to establish a common understanding of (intuitive) terminology and concepts, connects this to current phenomena arising out of ever-increasing interconnectivity and computational power and helps operationalize the protection of autonomy through application of the proposed frameworks.

Emotions in legal decisions: the construction of objective narratives in Italian criminal trials

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Italian courts and prosecution offices, this dissertation offers new perspectives on legal decision-making by highlighting the importance of emotions for constructing and evaluating legal narratives. Focusing on criminal cases, it describes and dissects how judges and prosecutors use emotions in reflection and action tied to lay narratives and legal constraints. The analysis shows that legal professionals engage in different types of emotional dynamics when dealing with stories; first, they develop gut feelings, which are either endorsed or kept at distance by means of emotional reflexivity, to comply with legal ideals of objectivity and impartiality. Second, empathy emerges as a crucial tool to direct the interaction with lay people and to interpret legal prerequisites, such as credibility, and intent. Finally, the dissertation shows that lay stories lead legal professionals to become passionate and committed towards the correct application of the law, the restoration of the moral order, and the achievement of justice. In light of the empirical findings, this thesis strives to develop a theoretical understanding of legal decision-making as narrative work that includes emotional dynamics consistent with rational, objective action.