After my joyful experience of attending ICAIL 2026 last summer, I am very happy to have two student-led papers accepted at JURIX 2026! Alyson Ranucci (MSc Computer Science) and Daan Boven (BSc Computer Science) both submitted their theses (grades: 9 and 9) to JURIX 2026, the 39th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, pretty much as-is.
Pre-prints incoming, see small synopses of the papers below.
Towards More Granular Reasoning: Mapping the DSA Transparency Database Taxonomy to Platform Terms and Conditions Using Large Language Models
Alyson Ranucci, Eline Leijten, David Graus
Alyson wrote her thesis on the Digital Services Act’s Transparency database (DSA-TDB); in her work, she compares the taxonomy of Statements-of-Reason VLOPs and VLOSEs can give for content moderation, and compares it to these same platforms’ own Terms & Conditions (using the very excellent Terms and Conditions Database! She finds that the DSA categories fit some types of platforms much better than others, and they overlap, which makes catch-all reporting (the “other” category) a predictable result of the database’s design.
This work is led by Alyson Ranucci and co-authored with Eline Leijten (Amsterdam Law & Technology Institute, VU Amsterdam) and me.
Machina Pauliana: A neuro-symbolic approach to the actio pauliana in Dutch insolvency law
Daan Boven, Gregor Behnke, David Graus
Daan, dual bachelor Law (Leiden University) and Computer Science (UvA) came to me and my colleague Gregor Behnke, with the proposal of automating the “actio pauliana” of Article 42 of the Dutch Bankruptcy Act (Faillissementswet, Fw). The only natural response when a student comes in with such a proposal is what’s that yes, let’s do it! In this very self-driven work, Daan develops a neuro-symbolic model of Article 42 Fw, which consists of a symbolic part developed through pair programming with legal experts, and a neural component that handles open-textured terms through advanced RAG (RAG with pre- and post-retrieval steps).
This work is led by Daan Boven and co-authored with Gregor Behnke and me.
Spotlight Tutorial: From Records to Release: An IR/NLP Tour of the Open Government Disclosure Lifecycle
In addition to co-authoring these two papers, I’ll be giving a spotlight tutorial on the Open Government disclosure lifecycle from an IR and NLP perspective, based on work in preparation with Maik Larooij, Maarten Marx, and Jaap Kamps. Read more details on the tutorial page at opengov.nl.
