A Basic Study of Legal Expert System--Artificial Intelligence Aproach to Legal Reasoning--

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The object of this research is to clarify the logical structure of legal knowledge through the analysis of the language of positive law, and to develop a basis for a legal expert system which can carry out inferencing for legal justification according to its praxis. In order to clarify and demonstrate these principles and methods, this research aims at making an experimental prototype on an AI workstation which consists of a knowledge base, an inference engine and a user interface. We have almost completely accomplished this research objective.(1) As far as the clarification of the structure of the legal knowledge is concerned, we have analyzed the articles of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (part) in terms of the legal requirements and legal effects and made clear logical connections among the legal rules.(2)On the AI-workstation PSI-II, we have made a legal-knowledge base composed of compound predicate logical formulae of legal rules and meta-legal rules in the above areas.(3) As fat as the inference engine is concerned, we have achieved the following : (a) we have developed an inference engine which performs inferencing to determine the applicable legal rules while treating those inferences dedctively ; (b) we have built a system to explain the inferencial processes performed ; (c) we have implemented an engineering model of adductive reasoning using legal thesaurus structures and have examined its efficacy and relevant problems. Further more we have clarified certain principles and methods of the electronic concept dictionary of low.We can say that we have successfully examined the logical, legal-philosophical, legal-sociological, civil law, information-engineering and knowledge-engineering foundations of the field. The has convinced us that using this work as a basis we can undertake research toward the development of a full-scale legal expert system.