People
Faculty Members
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Carole D. Hafner |
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Professor Hafner's primary research areas are natural-language processing, ontology design, and the application of artificial intelligence to law. She developed an ontology for commercial transactions and demonstrated its potential to support concept-based retrieval of legal documents. With her PhD student, she later explored the ontological challenges of representing experimental procedures in molecular biology. This work built on Professor Hafner's earlier development of the natural-language query system Datalog, in which an ontological framework was used to translate users’ English language questions into formal database queries.
Professor Hafner was among the first researchers to apply artificial intelligence to law. She co-wrote a series of articles revealing flaws in existing legal case-based reasoning models, showing how incorporating contextual knowledge about social goals underlying legal doctrines would improve case-based reasoners' accuracy.