Representation of an actual divorce dispute in the parenting plan support system

Abstract

This paper evaluates the Parenting Plan Support System, a partially implemented decision support system designed to help parents to draft an agreement concerning relations with their children after the divorce, against the background of a real-life case. The focus here is on knowledge representation issues and the functioning of the inference engine. General TermsTheory

Framing a Knowledge Base for a Legal Expert System Dealing with Indeterminate Concepts

“…PPSS [ 8 – 10 ], partially implemented in [ 11 ], is a negotiation decision support system to support parents in drafting an agreement (the parenting plan ) to govern their exercise of parental custody over minor children after a divorce is granted under Polish law.…”

“…This paper is concerned with the system's conceptual architecture rather than its technological aspects. Although the system has not as yet been fully implemented, some initial attempts have been made [ 11 ]. An important subset of the system's knowledge base has been extracted from thirty actual and influential judgments by the Polish Supreme Court, yielding a large number of salient factors that will play a crucial role in the operation of the system, as detailed below.…”

“…Such assessment is made possible by the rule-based inference engine, which takes as input the Environmental Factors introduced by users and the options they choose, generating an evaluation of these options as output. This part of the system has been partially implemented [ 11 ]. The development of this module is of central interest here.…”

“…PPSS contains a library of ten dimensions, each related to one of the important broad issues (categories) that inform the content of any parenting plan. More detailed lists of the dimensions can be found in [ 9 , 11 ]. Each dimension comprises a ten-step ordinal scale [0–9] (from least favourable to most acceptable with respect to the well-being of the child).…”

Accommodating change

“…The second paper (Berman and Hafner 1993), which introduced the notion of the purposes of the laws, or the social values they were designed to promote, as a way of guiding decisions in cases not yet covered by precedents, has proved highly influential, giving rise to a whole series of papers exploring the use of social values in legal case based reasoning. These include several papers from the issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law in memory of Don Berman (Bench-Capon 2002;Prakken 2002;Sartor 2002), later work such as Bench-Capon and Sartor (2003), and very recent work such as Prakken et al (2015), Araszkiewicz et al (2015) and Al-Abdulkarim et al (2015).…”