Modeling Legislation Using Natural Language Processing

This paper describes the possibilities of the translation of legislation, which is written in natural language, into a formal language, i.e. UML/OCL. The tool OPAL (Object-oriented Parsing and Analysis of Legislation) is developed to support the automatic modelling of legislation with the use of appropriate NLP techniques. The aim is not to perform this modelling in a batch fashion from legislation to final model, but interactively in dialogue with the knowledge engineer. The main components of OPAL are a parser (based on a chart-parser algorithm) and a model generator. A special component called modelling interface is added to OPAL to give the knowledge engineer the possibility to keep track of the modelling process and to make adjustments to the final model