Sense-making software for crime investigation: how to combine stories and arguments?

Abstract

Sense-making software for crime investigation should be based on a model of reasoning about evidence that is both natural and rationally well-founded. A formal model is proposed that combines AI formalisms for abductive inference to the best explanation and for defeasible argumentation. Stories about what might have happened in a case are represented as causal networks and possible hypotheses can be inferred by abductive reasoning. Links between stories and the available evidence are expressed with evidential generalisations that express how observations can be inferred from evidential sources with defeasible argumentation. It is argued that this approach unifies two well-known accounts of reasoning about evidence, namely, anchored narratives theory and new evidence theory. After the reasoning model is defined, a design is presented for sense-making software that allows crime investigators to visualise their thinking about a case in terms of the reasoning model.

A hybrid formal theory of arguments, stories and criminal evidence

“…This paper aims to expound mainly the formal logical version of the hybrid theory developed by Bex (2009), previous versions of which were discussed in (Bex et al 2007a(Bex et al , 2007b). This formal theory, which has served as the basis of the sense-making and visualization tool AVERS, 7 models reasoning with arguments as defeasible argumentation and reasoning with stories as abductive (modelbased) inference to the best explanation.…”

On the relation between cognitive and biological modelling of criminal behaviour

“…This can be done, for example, by generating simulations (or fictive scenarios), and matching these with the information known from the real scenario, or by ruling out certain possible scenarios by using argumentation techniques (cf. Bex et al, 2007). The current paper contributes a small step to that project, by establishing a tighter connection between biological and psychological characteristics of offenders.…”

A history of AI and Law in 50 papers: 25 years of the international conference on AI and Law

“…One of the nicest things about the hybrid approach is that it enables an analyst of legal evidence to provide computer-assisted visualization of an explanation that is comparable to an argument map [51]. Even better, the diagrams in [51] can combine argument and explanation by showing how each of the nodes (events or actions) or arcs (transitions from one node to another) can be supported by evidence or attacked by counter-evidence.…”

“…Even better, the diagrams in [51] can combine argument and explanation by showing how each of the nodes (events or actions) or arcs (transitions from one node to another) can be supported by evidence or attacked by counter-evidence. This feature was the basic idea of the anchored narratives approach, whose advocates showed it could be applied in a helpful way to analyzing and evaluating evidence in criminal cases [273].…”