Call for Participation: Competition on Legal Information Extraction and Entailment 2020

The Competition on Legal Information Extraction and Entailment (COLIEE) is seeking participants for this year’s event, produced in association with the 14th International Workshop on Juris-informatics 2020. COLIEE, which is now in its seventh year, is co-organized by teams of researchers from Canada and Japan – including Amii Fellow Professor Randy Goebel of the University of Alberta and Professor Ken Satoh of the National Institute of Informatics. 

Applications are requested by July 3, 2020 (submission details below).

COLIEE seeks to build a community of practice around legal information processing and textual entailment, to encourage both the adoption and adaptation of general methods from a variety of fields. Participants are urged to share their approaches, problems and results. Last year, the event featured 21 teams representing 13 different countries.

This year’s event includes tasks on statute law in English (Tasks 1 and 2) as well as case law in either English or Japanese (Tasks 3 and 4). Details on all tasks, submission criteria and important dates can be found at http://www.ualberta.ca/~rabelo/COLIEE2020/

Task 1 is a legal case retrieval task, which involves reading a new case and extracting supporting cases from the provided case law corpus, to support the decision. Task 2 is a legal case entailment task, involving the identification of one or more paragraphs from an existing case that entail a fragment of a new case. Task 3 is to consider a yes/no legal question and retrieve relevant statutes from a database of Japanese civil code statutes while Task 4 is to confirm entailment of a yes/no answer from the retrieved civil code statutes.

Submission Details

Interested participants are encouraged to apply via email to Juliano Rebelo (rabelo@ualberta.ca). Each application must include a completed application form as well as a memorandum for each task that the applicant wishes to compete in. Applicants may choose any (or both) language datasets and any task for participation.

Download links:

• Application Form (.docx)
• Memorandum for Tasks 1 and  2 (.pdf)  – Case law competition, English data
• Memorandum for Tasks 3 and 4 (.pdf) – Statute law competition, English Data
• Memorandum for Tasks 3 and 4 (.pdf)– Statute law competition, Japanese Data 

Participants are required to submit a paper on their method and experimental results. At least one of the authors of an accepted paper must register for JURISIN 2020 and present the paper on-site at the special COLIEE 2020 session or online if they cannot attend the session on-site. The papers by the winners of each task in the competition will be further reviewed and considered for inclusion in the LNAI 2020 post-proceedings. This year’s event takes place on November 16th & 17th in Yokohama, Japan (note: there is a possibility that JURISIN 2020 will take place online).

This year’s task coordinators include Mi-Young Kim (University of Alberta, Canada); Randy Goebel (University of Alberta, Canada); Juliano Rabelo (University of Alberta, Canada); Ken Satoh (National Institute of Informatics, Japan); Yoshinobu Kano (Shizuoka University, Japan); and Masaharu Yoshioka (Hokkaido University, Japan).

Learn more about the COLIEE 2020 Call for Participation and associated tasks at https://sites.ualberta.ca/~rabelo/COLIEE2020/