# - Call for Papers -

The Seventh Workshop on Automated Semantic Analysis of Information in Legal Texts (ASAIL) will be held online in conjunction with the 20th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2025). It is a continuation of the successful prior ASAIL workshops at ICAIL and JURIX.

The workshop will explore the application of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques to the semantic analysis of legal texts, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars, researchers, legal practitioners, and service providers. Semantic analysis, which links linguistic structures to domain-specific meanings, is critical for processing legal information effectively. The range of focal texts includes:

* Statutes, regulations, and court-made pronouncements of legal rules embodying legal norms;
* Textual arguments in legal case decisions interpreting legal norms and applying them in concrete fact situations;
* Legislative and policy-based debates concerning proposed legal norms, their purpose and meaning;
* Actual and proposed contracts that need to be analyzed for the permissions and obligations they encode and their consistency with organisational preferences or legal frameworks;
* Technical reports and other evidentiary documents;
* Court testimony and narrative texts in submissions by self-represented parties.

# Covered Topics
* Advances in automated semantic analysis of legal texts, including integration of state-of-the-art ML techniques such as LLMs (large language models), foundation models, and transfer learning.
* Adaptation and fine-tuning of NLP tools for the unique characteristics of legal texts, including multilingual and cross-jurisdictional analysis.
* Automated or semi-automated extraction of legal norms and principles from textual sources.
* Argument mining from court case documentation, legislative records, legal policy debates.
* Extraction and evaluation of fact-finding reasoning and precedent alignment from case decisions.
* Applications of advanced linguistic theories, including pragmatics and discourse analysis, to improve legal NLP tools.
* Development of user-friendly annotation environments for training and validating AI systems on legal texts.
* Innovations in summarisation, visualisation, and retrieval for legal texts, including systems tailored for diverse legal traditions and multilingual corpora.
* Automated translation of legal text into formal or abstract representations to support reasoning and decision-making.
* Advances in XAI (explainable AI) and human-AI interaction with specific applications to legal NLP, focusing on transparency, fairness, and bias mitigation.

# Inclusiveness
The ASAIL workshops strive for inclusiveness and the organising committee encourages submissions of work concerning all legal systems, traditions, and languages.

# Papers Solicited
We invite papers written in English on, and demonstrations of, original work on the above listed and other aspects of automated detection, extraction and analysis of semantic information in legal texts. We accept:

* Full research papers (10 pages in the approved style plus bibliography);
* Short papers (6 pages in the approved style plus bibliography).

# Paper Contribution Evaluation
To maintain ASAIL’s relevance in the larger, rapidly moving field of legal text analytics, paper submissions must explicitly identify their substantial contribution to the state of the art and provide a satisfying amount of discussion given the length of the paper. Possible forms of contribution include:

* Application of novel NLP techniques to a known corpus;
* Application of known NLP techniques to a novel corpus; and
* Detailed survey and analysis of a novel corpus that will be shared with the community and/or exhibits phenomena of broader interest.

For full papers: In explaining a paper’s contribution, the authors should present, as well as discuss, their data, results and model behaviour in sufficient depth, and go beyond reporting common metrics.

For short papers: The authors should present and discuss interesting ideas and approaches related to the topics described above, with or without preliminary results. Short papers will be selected based on their capacity to encourage fruitful discussion and exchange of ideas between the authors and workshop participants.

# Single-blind Review
ASAIL uses a single-blind peer-review process; authors are not required to anonymise any aspect of their submission, but reviewers will be kept anonymous to the authors. We adopt this process as an expedient balance between any concerns of bias and facilitating submission.

# Format & Submission
While the bibliography is extraneous to the page limit, papers should be self-contained as ASAIL proceedings do not include appendices. A Program Committee will review all types of papers using the conference review system. Submissions will be evaluated on appropriateness for this call, originality of the research described, technical quality, and capability to encourage discussion. Authors of selected papers will be invited to present the papers at the Workshop, with at least one author per accepted paper expected to register and attend in person (although remote presentation is available).

Any paper under review for alternative proceedings should NOT be submitted for peer-review at ASAIL.

Our expectation is that accepted papers will be published as part of the workshop proceedings at CEUR-WS, as in prior ASAIL workshops. Hence, all papers must follow the two-column CEUR-WS Layout [Latex, Word]. Papers not conforming to the style or exceeding the length limitation will be rejected without review. Papers must be submitted via Microsoft CMT by the due date.

# Workshop Format
Accepted full and short papers will be presented in thematically organised sessions (e.g., “Language Models in the Legal Domain”, “Automatic Legal Knowledge Extraction”, “Applied Legal Case Analysis”, and “Structured Reasoning in the Legal Context”).

Following the presentations, an author panel segment will bring together the session's presenters for a moderated discussion. These panels will focus on addressing questions from the audience, exploring the implications of presented work, and identifying open challenges and future directions in the field. This format ensures that the workshop is not only a platform for sharing research but also an incubator for collaborative ideas and community engagement.

# Important Dates
* Submissions due: May 6, 2025 (AoE)
* Notification of acceptance: May 24, 2025
* Camera-Ready Papers due: June 1, 2025

# Venue
The workshop will be held for a full-day on Monday 16th June in conjunction with ICAIL 2025, at the Northwestern University, Chicago, USA. The workshop will be organised with hybrid in-person and remote participation available. At least one author per accepted paper is expected to register and attend in person (although remote presentation is available).

# Organising Committee
Francesca Lagioia, European University Institute and University of Bologna, Italy
Jack Mumford, University of Liverpool, UK (chair)
Hannes Westermann, Maastricht University, Netherlands

# Advisory Board
Kevin D. Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK
Enrico Francesconi, Italian National Research Council (IGSG-CNR) and European Parliament, Italy
Matthias Grabmair, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Jaromír Šavelka, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Vern R. Walker, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, USA
Bernhard Waltl, BMW Group AG, Germany
Adam Wyner, Swansea University, UK