Creating rules using abduction for legal reasoning by logic programming

Abstract

To create rules for a legal knowledge base, a knowledge from a lawyer cannot be represented in a predicate rule immediately. On the other hand, a programmer cannot create the rule to cover all of the legal knowledge base. Therefore, we need the procedure to suggest a legal expert. Indeed, the rules cannot be created only by facts or rules from legislation but also depend on the interpretation of each expert. In this paper, we proposed a procedure to create rules for legal knowledge base. First, a set of rules is created using based rules and compound rules procedure. Second, the rules are selected by abduction for the legal reasoning process. Finally, we improved a Switch of Burden of Proof (SBP) [1] which is the legal reasoning system to examine the rules obtained from abduction. Thai Civil and Commercial Code is used as a knowledge base. The result showed that using our approach can find rules for an explanation of each legal case. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.