Representation and reasoning with temporal expressions in the legal domain

Reasoning on temporal references present in free text documents is a challenging problem demanding the synergy of several disciplines in Artificial Intelligence. First, Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are necessary to mine temporal expressions (referring to instants and events) and their relations; then, knowledge representation systems able to support more than trivial temporal information must be defined; finally, temporal logic systems exposing practical functionality are much demanded. Documents in the legal domain are rich in temporal expressions, often linked to a norm. Permissions, obligations and prohibitions are often bounded by temporal constraints. While there exist different rules and policy languages capable of representing temporal constraints to some extent, they are far from being able to express the complex temporal relations present in these legal texts. Reaching a formalized expression of temporal rules able to accommodate the findings of the NLP algorithms and enabling temporal reasoning in an integrated manner would unleash new possibilities in the area of legal reasoning. As this thesis is still in an early phase, Doctoral Consortium feedback will be extremely valuable for topic delimitation and additional research lines