Forms and Modified Rules: A Knowledge Representation Technique for Legal Consultation

Abstract

Many knowledge based systems that solve the complex problems in the field of medicine, chemistry, mathematics, structural engineering etc, have been developed using AI techniques. The legal domain is also a near perfect area for the development of such knowledge based systems. The purpose of developing such a system in the legal realm may be for the legal information retrieval, anticipating the legal consequences of proposed actions, legal analysis of certain fact situations as well as assisting the lawyers in designing legal documents. Most knowledge based systems, particularly in the legal domain, employ the production rules to represent the domain knowledge and to describe the strategies and procedures adopted by the legal practitioners. This paper discusses a knowledge representation technique that employs production rules, modified so as to include the source references from where the chunk of knowledge represented by it has been gleaned from, and frame like structures called FORMS in unison. Use of forms has eliminated the need of meta-rules which are used for the management of the explicit groupings of the production rules as well as improved the systems knowledge organization for FOCUSED reasoning. These ideas have been used in the development of a legal analysis system that uses the INDUSTRIAL DISPUTES ACT OF INDIA to furnish the required domain knowledge.

Indexing terms:

• Knowledge representation
• Legal reasoning