Editor-in-Chief: Guido Governatori, Central Queensland University, Australia
Frequency: Continuous
Submission to First Decision: 10 days
Submission to Acceptance: 60 days
Accept to Publish: 15 days
© 2026 Bon View Publishing Pte Ltd.
Call for Papers-SI on NLL2FR2025
Special Issue on Translating Natural Legal Language into Formal Representation
Aims and Scope
As legal systems increasingly intersect with digital technologies, the formal representation of legal norms has become essential. Structured knowledge representation provides a rigorous foundation for modeling legal reasoning and supports practical applications such as automated compliance checking, legal advisory tools, and normative reasoning in autonomous systems like self-driving cars and AI-driven legal decision-making. While many rigorous frameworks for legal knowledge representation and reasoning have shown great potential, they often assume that legal knowledge can already be expressed in formal languages. In reality, however, most legal rules and case descriptions are written in natural language, creating a significant gap between natural legal language and formal representations. Recent advances in natural language processing—particularly those driven by large language models—have led to promising applications in AI and Law, including legal information retrieval, summarization, and information extraction.
NLL2FR2025 aims to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in bridging the gap between natural legal language and formal representations. Our interest extends beyond the translation of natural language rules into logical formulae to include the formalization of legal case described in natural language.
Lead Guest Editor
Ken Satoh
Center for Juris-Informatics, ROIS-DS, Japan
Research Interests: Law, Ethics, Artificial Intelligence, Legal Compliance
Guest Editors
Georg Borges
Saarland University, Germany
Research Interests: Legal Informatics, AI and Emerging Tech Regulation, Data Protection and Cloud Services, Civil and Business Law, Legal Theory
Hannes Westermann
Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence and Law, Large Language Models, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning
May Myo Zin
Center for Juris-Informatics, ROIS-DS, Japan
Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Legal AI
Topics of Interest
Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
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Translating natural language legal rules into logical representations
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Constructing legal ontologies from natural language documents
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Extracting legal factors from case texts
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Extracting and structuring argumentation from natural language sources
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Reusable outputs, including formalization tools, logic patterns, or shared datasets
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Verification and validation of formal legal representations in practice
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Any theories and technologies which is not directly related to the workshop but have the potential to contribute to the workshop
Manuscript Submission Information
Submission deadline: May 31 , 2026
Submissions that pass pre-check will be reviewed by at least two reviewers of the specific field.
If you have any queries regarding this special issue or other matters, please feel free to contact the editorial office: jcllt@bonviewpress.com
