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

A Web-Based Tool for Analysing Normative Documents in English

Our goal is to use formal methods to analyse normative documents written in English, such as privacy policies and service-level agreements. This requires the combination of a number of different elements, including information extraction from natural language, formal languages for model representation, and an interface for property specification and verification. We have worked on a collection of components for this task: a natural language extraction tool, a suitable formalism for representing such documents, an interface for building models in this formalism, and methods for answering queries asked of a given model. In this work, each of these concerns is brought together in a web-based tool, providing a single interface for analysing normative texts in English. Through the use of a running example, we describe each component and demonstrate the workflow established by our tool

The Existence of Maslahah Mursalah as the Basis of Islamic Law Development in Indonesia

Makalah ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis konsepsi maslahah dalam wacana perkembangan hukum Islam. Selanjutnya, makalah ini menguraikan keberadaan masalah dan melihat lebih dalam ke dalam implementasi masalah sebagai dasar untuk pengembangan hukum Islam di Indonesia. Makalah ini adalah yuridis normatif menggunakan pendekatan doktrinal. Pada akhirnya, dapat disimpulkan bahwa konsepsi maslahah adalah metode penggalian hukum Islam yang didasarkan pada aspek manfaat dan kebaikan bagi manusia selama tidak bertentangan dengan norma syariah Islam. Selain itu, implementasi masalah sebagai dasar untuk penemuan hukum Islam di Indonesia tidak dapat disangkal. Hal ini dapat dilihat dari daruratnya undang-undang atau peraturan di bawahnya yang mengatur berbagai aspek hukum Islam di Indonesia dalam menanggapi masalah kehidupan masyarakat sebagai dampak dari zaman dan teknologi

EU Terminology in Interpreter Training: Selected Problem Areas Connected With EU-Related Texts

Selected aspects of the aforementioned issues shall be verified in a case study conducted on trainee interpreters

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

The Law of Interpretation

How should we interpret legal instruments? How do we identify the law they create? Current approaches largely fall into two broad camps. The standard picture of interpretation is focused on language, using various linguistic conventions to discover a document\u27s meaning or a drafter\u27s intent. Those who see language as less determinate take a more skeptical view, urging judges to make interpretive choices on policy grounds. Yet both approaches neglect the most important resource available: the already applicable rules of law. Legal interpretation is neither a subfield of linguistics nor an exercise in policymaking. Rather, it is deeply shaped by preexisting legal rules. These rules tell us what legal materials to read and how to read them. Like other parts of the law, what we call the law of interpretation has a claim to guide the actions of judges, officials, and private interpreters -- even if it isn\u27t ideal. We argue that legal interpretive rules are conceptually possible, normatively sensible, and actually part of our legal system. This Article thus reframes the theory of statutory and constitutional interpretation, distinguishing purely linguistic questions from legal questions to which language offers no unique answer. It also has two concrete implications of note. It provides a framework for analyzing the canons of interpretation, determining whether they are legally valid and how much authority they bear. And it helps resolve debates over constitutional interpretation and construction, explaining how construction can go beyond the text but not beyond the law