Dr. Kevin Ashley

"Applying Scientific Hypothesis Testing to Predict Case Outcomes:  The Predictive Role of Legal Concepts"

Thursday, April 22, 4 PM

Packard Lab, Room 466

Abstract:  After a brief introduction to the topic of AI & Law, this talk will focus on a particular example of how AI techniques can help investigate cognitive phenomena in the legal domain. In particular, I will discuss an effort to apply a process of scientific hypothesis testing to the prediction of outcomes of legal cases. The Issue-Based Prediction algorithm (IBP) combines reasoning with an abstract domain model and case-based reasoning techniques to predict the outcome of case-based legal arguments. In an empirical evaluation, IBP outperformed a variety of machine learning algorithms, and it can also explain its predictions.  The experiments described here demonstrate a role that legal concepts play in predicting the decisions of new cases. The experiments explore this role by ablating (i.e., turning off or modifying) the contributions of legal concepts in variations of the IBP and related algorithms. The experiments confirm that legal concepts play a guiding role in deciding new cases by framing successful predictive hypotheses.


Bio:  Dr. Kevin Ashley holds interdisciplinary appointments as a faculty member of the Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh, a Senior Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, a Professor of Law, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science. His goals are to contribute to Artificial Intelligence (AI) research on case-based and analogical reasoning, argumentation and explanation and to develop instructional and information retrieval systems for professionals in case-based domains such as law and ethics.  Currently, he and his students are pursuing research projects in automatically indexing legal case texts, engaging law students in on-line argumentation dialogues, intelligent retrieval of ethics codes and cases, and web-based tutoring to help students get more from reading ethics cases.  He received a B.A. in philosophy (magna cum laude) from Princeton University in 1973, J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard Law School in 1976, and Ph.D. in computer science in 1988 from the University of Massachusetts where he held an IBM Graduate Research Fellowship. In April, 1990, the National Science Foundation selected Professor Ashley as a Presidential Young Investigator, and in 2002 he was selected as a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence.