eMediation Towards Smart Online Dispute Resolution E. Fersini 1 , E. Messina 1 , L. Manenti 1 , G. Bagnara 1 S. El Jelali 1 and G. Arosio 2 1 DISCo, University of Milano-Bicocca,Viale Sarca 336, Milan, Italy 2 Consorzio Milano Ricerche, Viale Cozzi 53, Milan, Italy Keywords: e-Justice, Online Dispute Resolution, eMediation, Knowledge Management, Machine Learning. Abstract: In this paper, the main requirements towards the next generation of Smart Online Dispute Resolution Systems for eMediation are presented and addressed through the definition of an advanced computational intelligence framework. The main contributions can be distinguished with respect to the parties involved in the eMediation process. Concerning the disputants, the main advancements are related to a smart data collection environment to state the essence of the litigation and an intelligent retrieval of court decisions to improve the awareness of the parties about their liability. Regarding the role of the mediator, the essential point addressed relates to an estimation of disputant flexibility to facilitate the optimal mediation strategies. 1 INTRODUCTION The increasing workload of civil justice courts is en- couraging the adoption of novel litigation support systems. A recent EU Directive 1 highlights the im- portance of facilitating access to Alternative Dispute Resolution (proceedings with no formal court hear- ing), to promote the amicable settlement of disputes by encouraging the use of ADR and ensuring a bal- anced relationship between ADR and judicial proce- dures. In order to understand the role that ICT could play in settlement of conflicts, we report the num- bers of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) cases addressed at European level. According to the 2011 report disclosed by the EU Parliament the increasing trend in the use of ADR counts about 410.000 cases in 2006, 473.000 in 2007 and more than 500.000 in 2008. More impressive numbers are related to the Italian context, with a particular focus on mediation (one of the available schemas for ADR). Accord- ing to the statistics provided by the Italian Ministry of Justice, about 231.500 cases have been addressed through ADR between March 2011 and September 2013. Italy’s Central Bank has estimated 16 billion euro loss in terms of GDP caused by the slow of civil justice, highlighting the needs of encouraging alterna- tive resolutions of disputes both from citizen and “jus- tice system” points of view. The comparison of Italian 1 2008/52/EC of 21st May 2008 in and out of court civil proceedings - average trial du- ration of 1066 days versus 65 days time limit for me- diation - makes clear the role that ICT could play to shift from ADR to ODR (Online Dispute Resolution), where technology could facilitate and speed up the resolution of disputes. Several commercial initiatives, mainly focused on Internet-based support toolsets, have been introduced to enable ODR, while the re- search initiatives are mainly focused on advanced rea- soning mechanisms to facilitate the resolution of the disputes under a specific negotiation schema. A first example of computational negotiation system is rep- resented by DEUS (Zeleznikow et al., 1995) that, re- ceiving as input specific goals and beliefs of litigants, computes the agreement level in family law property negotiations. More sophisticated systems are repre- sented by Split-Up (Zeleznikow and Stranieri, 1995) and Family-Winner (Bellucci and Zeleznikow, 2001). Split-Up is a hybrid framework that combines rule- based systems and neural networks to assist disputes about properties distribution. Family-Winner, which is a game theory-based approach for Australian fam- ily negotiations, asks disputants to list the items in- volved in the litigation and to assign a corresponding relevance value. The system formulates an influence diagrams to subsequently use game theory to deter- mine a suitable trade-off between claims. Moreover, the BEST-project (Uijttenbroek et al., 2008) provides ontology-based search of law cases to allow parties the opportunity to evaluate claims and liabilities. (For 228 Fersini E., Messina E., Manenti L., Bagnara G., El Jelali S. and Arosio G.. eMediation - Towards Smart Online Dispute Resolution. DOI: 10.5220/0005080002280236 In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2014), pages 228-236 ISBN: 978-989-758-050-5 Copyright c  2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)