Induction of defeasible logic theories in the legal domain

The market for intelligent legal information systems remains relatively untapped and while this might be interpreted as an indication that it is simply impossible to produce a system that satisfies the needs of the legal community, an analysis of previous attempts at producing such systems reveals a common set of deficiencies that in-part explain why there have been no overwhelming successes to date. Defeasible logic, a logic with proven successes at representing legal knowledge, seems to overcome many of these deficiencies and is a promising approach to representing legal knowledge. Unfortunately, an immediate application of technology to the challenges in this domain is an expensive and computationally intractable problem. So, in light of the benefits, we seek to find a practical algorithm that uses heuristics to discover an approximate solution. As an outcome of this work, we have developed an algorithm that integrates defeasible logic into a decision support system by automatically deriving its knowledge from databases of precedents. Experiments with the new algorithm are very promising - delivering results comparable to and exceeding other approaches