Abduction and Legal Reasoning

Citation

Maggenti G, Bracciali A & Mancarella P (2008) Abduction and Legal Reasoning. In: e-Forensics '08 Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Forensic applications and techniques in telecommunications, information, and multimedia and workshop, volume Article No. 33. e-Forensics 2008: 1st international conference on Forensic applications and techniques in telecommunications, information, and multimedia and workshop, Adelaide, Australia, 21.01.2008-23.01.2008. Brussels, Belgium: ICST (Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering). http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1363260

Abstract
In this paper we present LAILA+, an extension of the LAILA coordination language for abductive logic agents, i.e. rea- soning agents that collaborate towards the solution of a given problem exploiting a set of distributed, possibly par- tial, knowledge of the application domain. The extension consists of i) the possibility for agents to communicate with each other hypotheses while devising a coordinated solu- tion, and ii) a relaxed consistency mechanism based on a given agent hierarchy: stronger agent coherence may over- come weaker agent inconsistency. We argue that the frame- work well adapts to legal reasoning, with agents that try to prove/disprove evidences from dierent, possibly partial and hierarchical, viewpoints, as often happens for instance in a trial.