Digital Legal Lab

Return of the AI: innovative study & workshop

In recent years, AI-related themes have gained considerable popularity in new disciplines, such as law. A group of Maastricht University researchers affiliated to the Digital Legal Lab – Constanta Rosca, Bogdan Covrig, Catalina GoantaGijs van Dijck & Jerry Spanakis – explored what legal research on AI constitutes of and how it has evolved, while addressing the issues of information retrieval and research duplication.

To do so, they chose an innovative approach – they used unsupervised machine learning to categorize legal research on AI and to map how legal scholarship on this topic has developed.

publication

The paper, Return of the AI: An analysis of legal research on Artificial Intelligence using topic modeling, was published in August 2020 (in: Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2020). Read it here. 

workshop

The research was presented at the second edition of the Workshop on Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP), which took place fully online in August 2020. The NLLP workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from Data Science (DS), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML) and other Artificial Intelligence (AI) disciplines, and the legal domain.

Watch a recording of the session by Constanta Rosca, Bogdan Covrig, Catalina Goanta, Gijs van Dijck & Jerry Spanakis here.