A multi-agent legal argument generator

One of the most significant series of experiments in AI and law is the investigation of case based reasoning carried out in the HYPO, CABERET and CATO projects. It is important to understand what has been achieved in these experiments, and this requires that the techniques be applied to a variety of domains. The techniques are not, however, straightforward to apply. In order to provide an experimental environment for investigating the techniques further, we have re-implemented the central argument generation process as a set of agents written in Java using IBM's Aglet agent building framework. By using this environment it will be possible to explore the general applicability of the techniques. In this paper we give a summary of an algorithmic description of argument building in HYPO and CATO, and describe our implementation of the algorithm.