Legal Knowledge Conveyed by Narratives: Towards a Representational Model

The paper investigates a representational model for narratives, aiming to facilitate the acquisition of the systematic core of stories concerning legal cases, i.e. the set of causal and temporal relationships that govern the world in which the narrated scenario takes place. At the discourse level, we consider narratives as sequences of messages collected in an observation, including descriptions of agents, of agents’ behaviour and of mechanisms relative to physical, mental and institutional domains. At the content level, stories correspond to synchronizations of embodied agent-roles scripts. Following this approach, the Pierson v Post case is analyzed in detail and represented as a Petri net.