Legal knowledge based systems

This paper describes some of the issues that have arisen from the development of an Intelligent Tutoring System to educate students in the statute-law domain. The originality of the system consists of a graphical environment, in which the student can represent valid legal arguments by constructing complex graphical structures. A brief description of the system is given, mainly the graphical environment or tutorial module, the authoring module and the expert-system module. The three modules share the same knowledge base, that is the rule-based representation of statute law, providing an interesting example of reusability of declarative knowledge. The rule-based representation of the statute is discussed, with the main difficulties encountered in catching the real meaning of the statute, while at the same time providing a suitable representation format for the graphical display. The system provides assistance to the student both during the process of constructing an argument and at the end of the exercise; the latter consisting of the overall assessment of the student performance for the given exercise, and the display of the correct answer as generated by the system. This assessment is supported by a dynamic student-modelling approach, which is based on the comparison of the student’s proof-tree and the correct proof-tree. The results of an interim evaluation of the system are also provided in this paper.

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