Now, computers become lawyers!

WASHINGTON - European researchers have created a legal analysis query engine that combines artificial intelligence, game theory and semantics to offer advice, conflict prevention and dispute settlement for European law.

European law is complex, many layered and expanding. There are thousands of regulations, so many that compliance is difficult, time-consuming and expensive.

While harmonization is underway, the process itself demands that individuals, companies and law firms often have to relearn the system.

Meanwhile, areas like intellectual property rights (IPR) and digital rights regulation that seek to combat piracy are becoming evermore complex to understand and apply consistently across Europe.

Now, the ALIS Project has developed a computerized platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI), game theory and semantic technologies to ‘understand’ and track the regulations in a large, and expanding area of expertise - in this case IPR.

ALIS sought to develop a working system in IPR to tackle the fundamental technological challenges before expanding it to more areas later on.

The system is much more than a simple database of relevant legal regulations.

It uses insights from game theory to help contentious parties come to an amicable agreement, either through conflict prevention or dispute resolution, and it can assist lawmaking as well.

Game theory looks at how strategic interactions between rational people lead to outcomes reflecting real player preferences.

It can be used to develop algorithms that find equilibria in games, markets, computational auctions, peer-to-peer systems, security and information markets.

Now, with ALIS, it is available for legal systems too.

This concept of equilibria supports conflict prevention, dispute resolution and offers decision support for lawmaking.

A key factor in the system is its test for regulatory compliance.

This is very powerful. It can help citizens, companies and lawyers quickly scan the relevant legal corpus to discover if they are compliant. It is a key factor for the other roles in the ALIS system as well.

For conflict prevention, dispute resolution and lawmaking, the ALIS first establishes if the parties, or the proposed legislation, are compliant with current law.

Once compliance is established, the system can present a series of options based on an analysis of the potential conflict or dispute, or it can provide information to further assist lawmakers to formulate policy.

Similarly, the tool aims to rapidly speed up the work done by lawyers, helping to resolve relatively straightforward cases faster, so they can concentrate on more complex problems. (ANI)