Argument Mining and Empirical Legal Research (AMELR)

Workshop at ICAIL 2025, Chicago (and Zoom), June 16-20, 2025

Overview

The first workshop on Argument Mining and Empirical Legal Reseach (AMELR) focuses on Legal Argument Mining (LAM) - using NLP to automatically detect legal arguments. LAM provides legal scholars with a powerful tool for studying reasoning patterns, interpretative theories, and biases across jurisdictions and legal systems. The workshop gathers experts in computer science, AI & Law, legal theory, and empirical legal studies to address key challenges of LAM: creating training datasets, developing reliable models, establishing reproducibility standards, and integrating LAM into legal research. The workshop aims to strengthen the emerging field of LAM and its role in empirical legal studies by sharing latest implementations, addressing core challenges, and establishing best practices.

The AMELR workshop is jointly organized by the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University and TrustHLT Group at Ruhr University Bochum and Technical University Darmstadt.

Invited Speakers

Call for Papers

We welcome submissions on all aspects of legal argument mining, especially its intersection with empirical legal research.

This includes but is not limited to:

  • Theoretical argumentation work relevant to empirical research or argument mining (e.g., argument structures and schemes, interpretation methods).
  • Legal Argument Mining tasks and their intersections to empirical legal research (e.g., argument extraction, relation prediction).
  • Gold standard datasets and annotations of legal documents (e.g., methodological concerns, practical tips for intercoder agreement or annotation guidelines).
  • Model development, selection, fine-tuning and evaluation.
  • Assessment and evaluation of legal reasoning and argument mining capabilities in (Large) Language Models.
  • Novel applications of argument mining in empirical legal studies/legal dogmatics.
  • Empirical analysis of data gained through Legal Argument Mining.
  • Best practices for Legal Argument Mining Field and its use in empirical legal research (e.g. publishing data, code).
  • Ethical considerations and future perspectives on LAM.

We invite unpublished work incl. early-stage research projects with preliminary findings.

Submission Guidelines

  • Template: Springer LNAI format (in English)
  • Initial Submission: Extended abstract (1 page) or early draft (5 pages + bibliography)
  • Final Paper: 8 pages maximum plus bibliography
  • Submission Platform: EasyChair (link forthcoming)

Important Dates

  • Extended Abstract/Early Draft Deadline: April 20, 2025
  • Notification of Acceptance: May 15, 2025
  • Full Paper (Work-In-Progress) Submission: June 5, 2025
  • Workshop Date: June 16 or 20, 2025 (to be announced)

All deadlines 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC -12).

Successful candidates need to register for the ICAIL conference.

Review Process

All submissions undergo double-blind peer review by at least two program committee members. Evaluation criteria include:

  • Novelty
  • Contribution to the field
  • Alignment with workshop themes
  • Diversity

Workshop Schedule

to be announced

Organizing Committee

  • Tomas Koref (Center for Critical Computational Studies - C3S, Goethe University Frankfurt and Charles University)
  • Lena Held (TrustHLT Group, Technical University Darmstadt)
  • Ivan Habernal (TrustHLT, Ruhr University Bochum)

Program Committee

  • Katie Atkinson (University of Liverpool)
  • Wolfgang Alschner (University of Ottawa)
  • Christoph Burchard (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
  • Daniel Chen (Harvard University/Toulouse School of Economics)
  • Arthur Dyevre (KU Leuven)
  • Gijs van Dijck (Maastricht University)
  • Ivan Habernal (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
  • Jakub Harasta (Masaryk University)
  • Elena Kantorowicz-Reznichenko (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
  • Tereza Novotna (Masaryk University)
  • Michal Ovadek (University College London)
  • Prakash Poudyal (Kathmandu University)
  • Jaromir Savelka (Carnegie Mellon University)
  • Michal Soltes (Charles University)
  • Bart Verheij (University of Groningen/Stanford University)

Contact

koref@c3s.uni-frankfurt.de

The AMELR workshop is proudly hosted as part of ICAIL 2025.