Logic-Based Tools for the Analysis and Representation of Legal Contracts

There has been a significant amount of research in Artificial Intelligence focusing on the representation of legislation and regulations. The motivation for this has been twofold: on the one hand there have been opportunities for developing advisory systems for legal practitioners; on the other hand the law is a complex domain in which diverse modes of reasoning are employed, offering ample opportunity to test existing Artificial Intelligence techniques as well as to develop new ones. The general aim of the thesis is to explore the potential for developing logic-based tools for the analysis and representation of legal contracts, by considering the following two questions: (a) To what extent can techniques developed for the representation of legislation and regulations be transferred and applied usefully in the domain of legal contracts? (b) What features are specific to legal contracts and what techniques can be developed to address them? The intended applications include both the drafting of new contracts and the management and administration of existing ones, that is to say, the general problem of storing and retrieving information from large contractual documents, and more specific tasks such as monitorin