Towards compliance checking in reified I/O logic via SHACL

Reified Input/Output logic has been recently proposed to handle natural language meaning in Input/Output logic. So far, the research in reified I/O logic has focused only on KR issues, specifically on how to use the formalism for representing contextual meaning of norms. This paper is the first attempt to investigate reasoning in reified I/O logic, specifically compliance checking. This paper investigates how to model reified I/O logic formulae in Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL), a recent W3C recommendation for validating and reasoning with RDFs/OWL

A compositional intersective account of Heterofunctional Coordination

The analysis presented in this paper extends the uniform intersective (“boolean”) treatment of conjunctive coordinators to Heterofunctional Coordination (HC), i.e., coordination of different grammatical functions. A compositional account of HC based on mainstream derivational syntax is proposed, one that makes Champollion’s (2015) “quantificational event semantics” compatible with derivational syntax. The analysis is based on the assumption, common in Minimalism, that traces of moved quantifiers denote domain restrictions rather than just variables

Towards legal compliance by correlating Standards and Laws with a semi-automated methodology

Since generally legal regulations do not provide clear parameters to determine when their requirements are met, achieving legal compliance is not trivial. The adoption of standards could help create an argument of compliance in favour of the implementing party, provided there is a clear correspondence between the provisions of a specific standard and the regulation's requirements. However, identifying such correspondences is a complex process which is complicated further by the fact that the established correlations may be overridden in time e.g., because newer court decisions change the interpretation of certain legal provisions. To help solve these problems, we present a framework that supports legal experts in recognizing correlations between provisions in a standard and requirements in a given law. The framework relies on state-of-the-art Natural Language Semantics techniques to process the linguistic terms of the two documents, and maintains a knowledge base of the logic representations of the terms, together with their defeasible correlations, both formal and substantive. An application of the framework is shown by comparing a provision of the European General Data Protection Regulation with the ISO/IEC 27018:2014 standard

Conjunction is Parallel Computation

This paper proposes a new, game theoretical, analysis of conjunction which provides a single logical translation of and in its sentential, predicate, and NP uses, including both Boolean and non-Boolean cases. In essence it analyzes conjunction as parallel composition, based on game-theoretic semantics and logical syntax by Abramsky (2007)

The Witness Set Constraint

This article is initially concerned with a famous constraint on the class of possible determiners in natural languages: the so-called Conservativity Constraint. We shall briefly illustrate the force of this constraint and infor- mally sketch Keenan and Stavi (1986)'s view according to which the Con- servativity Constraint derives from the boolean structure of natural lan- guage semantics. We shall proceed to discuss certain well-known linguistic categories that have been argued to be interpreted by non-conservative functions: only and the relative proportional determiners many and few. We shall take the challenge posed by the existence of these categories in order to propose an alternative to the Conservativity Constraint. This alternative will be dubbed the Witness Set Constraint, which is inspired in Barwise and Cooper (1981)'s considerations on the semantic process- ing of generalized quantifiers. We shall defend that the proposed con- straint does not suffer from the empirical shortcomings that have been attributed to the Conservativity Constraint, and indeed, we shall argue in detail that it correctly predicts (a) the existence of conservative de- terminers, (b) the non-existence of certain non-conservative determiners, such as inner negations, cardinal comparison determiners and the con- verses of non-trivial proportional determiners, and most importantly, (c) the existence of the non-conservative functions denoted by only and the relative proportional determiners many and few. This line of reasoning suggests that the class of functions from properties to sets of properties denoted in natural languages typically by determiners is constrained by a principle that simplifies the semantic processing of generalized quantifiers