6,895 research outputs found
Extracting Formal Models from Normative Texts
We are concerned with the analysis of normative texts - documents based on
the deontic notions of obligation, permission, and prohibition. Our goal is to
make queries about these notions and verify that a text satisfies certain
properties concerning causality of actions and timing constraints. This
requires taking the original text and building a representation (model) of it
in a formal language, in our case the C-O Diagram formalism. We present an
experimental, semi-automatic aid that helps to bridge the gap between a
normative text in natural language and its C-O Diagram representation. Our
approach consists of using dependency structures obtained from the
state-of-the-art Stanford Parser, and applying our own rules and heuristics in
order to extract the relevant components. The result is a tabular data
structure where each sentence is split into suitable fields, which can then be
converted into a C-O Diagram. The process is not fully automatic however, and
some post-editing is generally required of the user. We apply our tool and
perform experiments on documents from different domains, and report an initial
evaluation of the accuracy and feasibility of our approach.Comment: Extended version of conference paper at the 21st International
Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems (NLDB
2016). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1607.0148
Querying a regulatory model for compliant building design audit
The ingredients for an effective automated audit of a building design include a BIM model containing the design information, an electronic regulatory knowledge model, and a practical method of processing these computerised representations. There have been numerous approaches to computer-aided compliance audit in the AEC/FM domain over the last four decades, but none has yet evolved into a practical solution. One reason is that they have all been isolated attempts that lack any form of standardisation. The current research project therefore focuses on using an open standard regulatory knowledge and BIM representations in conjunction with open standard executable compliant design workflows to automate the compliance audit process. This paper provides an overview of different approaches to access information from a regulatory model representation. The paper then describes the use of a purpose-built high-level domain specific query language to extract regulatory information as part of the effort to automate manual design procedures for compliance audit
Integrating natural language and formal analysis for legal documents
Although much research has gone into natural language legal document analysis, practical solutions to support legal document drafting
and reasoning are still limited in number and functionality. However given the textual basis of law there is much potential for NLP
techniques to aid in the context of drafting legal documents, in particular contracts. Furthermore, there is a body of work focusing on
the formal semantics of norms and legal notions which has direct applications in analysis of such documents. In this paper we present
our attempt to use several off-the-shelf NLP techniques to provide a more intelligent contract editing tool to lawyers. We exploit these
techniques to extract information from contract clauses to allow intelligent browsing of the contract. We use this surface analysis to
bridge the gap between the English text of a contract to its formal representation, which is then amenable to automated deduction,
specifically it allows us to identify conflicts in the contract.peer-reviewe
Spanish Legislation as Linked Data
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Technologies for Regulatory Compliance co-located with the 31st International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, Groningen, NL, 12th of December 2018Legislation is officially published in Spain as HTML, PDF and XML. In the next few months, metadata will also be published as RDF, following the guidelines of the European Legislation Identifier (ELI) and using metadata records supported by the ELI ontology. The work presented here is an independent effort to publish Spanish consolidated legislation strongly linked to other external resources. In the published dataset, text is structured in articles; key terms are related to external terminological databases, named entities are identified, and links between internal and external documents have been automatically identified. The dataset is publicly available in a SPARQL endpoint
Towards a Semantic-based Approach for Modeling Regulatory Documents in Building Industry
Regulations in the Building Industry are becoming increasingly complex and
involve more than one technical area. They cover products, components and
project implementation. They also play an important role to ensure the quality
of a building, and to minimize its environmental impact. In this paper, we are
particularly interested in the modeling of the regulatory constraints derived
from the Technical Guides issued by CSTB and used to validate Technical
Assessments. We first describe our approach for modeling regulatory constraints
in the SBVR language, and formalizing them in the SPARQL language. Second, we
describe how we model the processes of compliance checking described in the
CSTB Technical Guides. Third, we show how we implement these processes to
assist industrials in drafting Technical Documents in order to acquire a
Technical Assessment; a compliance report is automatically generated to explain
the compliance or noncompliance of this Technical Documents
A Computational Framework for Formalizing Rules and Managing Changes in Normative Systems
Legal texts are typically written in a natural language. However, a legal text that is written in a formal language has the advantage of being subject to automation, at least partially. Such a translation is not easy, and the matter is even more complex because the law changes with time, so if we formalized a legal text that was originally written in natural language, there is a need to keep track of the change. This thesis proposes original developments on these subjects. In order to formalize a legal document, we provide a pipeline for the translation of a legal text from natural to formal language and we apply it to the case of natural resources contracts. In general, adjectives play an important role in a text and they allow to characterize it: for this reason we developed a logical system aimed at reasoning with gradable adjectives. Regarding norm change, we provide an ontology to represent change in a normative system, some basic mechanisms by which an agent may acquire new norms, and a study on the problem of revising a defeasible theory by only changing its facts. Another contribution of this thesis is a general framework for revision that includes the previous points as specific cases
JURI SAYS:An Automatic Judgement Prediction System for the European Court of Human Rights
In this paper we present the web platform JURI SAYS that automatically predicts decisions of the European Court of Human Rights based on communicated cases, which are published by the court early in the proceedings and are often available many years before the final decision is made. Our system therefore predicts future judgements of the court. The platform is available at jurisays.com and shows the predictions compared to the actual decisions of the court. It is automatically updated every month by including the prediction for the new cases. Additionally, the system highlights the sentences and paragraphs that are most important for the prediction (i.e. violation vs. no violation of human rights)
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