The Role of Normware in Trustworthy and Explainable AI

For being potentially destructive, in practice incomprehensible and for the most unintelligible, contemporary technology is setting high challenges on our society. New conception methods are urgently required. Reorganizing ideas and discussions presented in AI and related fields, this position paper aims to highlight the importance of normware--that is, computational artifacts specifying norms--with respect to these issues, and argues for its irreducibility with respect to software by making explicit its neglected ecological dimension in the decision-making cycle

eFLINT: a domain-specific language for executable norm specifications

Software systems that share potentially sensitive data are subjected to laws, regulations, policies and/or contracts. The monitoring, control and enforcement processes applied to these systems are currently to a large extent manual, which we rather automate by embedding the processes as dedicated and adaptable software services in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness. This approach requires such regulatory services to be closely aligned with a formal description of th

Thirty years of Artificial Intelligence and Law:the second decade

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on nine significant papers drawn from the Journal’s second decade. Four of the papers relate to reasoning with legal cases, introducing contextual considerations, predicting outcomes on the basis of natural language descriptions of the cases, comparing different ways of representing cases, and formalising precedential reasoning. One introduces a method of analysing arguments that was to become very widely used in AI and Law, namely argumentation schemes. Two relate to ontologies for the representation of legal concepts and two take advantage of the increasing availability of legal corpora in this decade, to automate document summarisation and for the mining of arguments

A Knowledge Engineering Approach to Comparing Legislation

In the E-POWER project relevant tax legislation and business processes are modelled in UML to improve the speed and efficiency with which the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration can implement decision support systems for internal use and for its clients. These conceptual models have also proven their usefulness for efficient and effective analysis of draft legislation. We are currently researching whether conceptual modeling can also be used to compare `similar' legislation from different jurisdictions. Better insight in the process of modeling and comparing legislation from different legislators is expected to improve the capacity of the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration to react to future consequences of increased movement of people, products, and money between EU member states and increased harmonization between tax authorities in Europe. In addition, the discovery of the requirements of comparing models is also expected to result in a more principled, more robust, and language-independent methodology for modeling legislation. This paper discusses known problems and requirements of comparing legislation, and the expected results of comparing models of legislation

Public Agility and Change in a Network Environment

Preparing for change is increasingly core business for governmental organizations. The networked society and the increasing connectedness of governmental organizations have as much impact on the complexity of the change process as the complexities of the corpus of law. Change is not only driven by changes in the law; changes in the organization’s environment often create a need to redesign business processes, reallocate roles and responsibilities, and reorder tasks. Moreover, preparations for change are not limited to the internal processes and systems of these organizations. Propagation of changes to network partners and redesign of network arrangements can be an enormous challenge. In the AGILE project, we develop a design method, distributed service architecture, and supporting tools that enable organizations - administrative and otherwise - to orchestrate their law-based services in a networked environment. This paper explains the Agile approach and describes some of its key principles

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

GoldminePower: Decisions in Governmental Process Design

The success of governmental policy depends much on the success of governmental services. Governmental services in its turn depend much on governmental processes. Governmental processes therefore are a determining factor for the success and especially the justification of governmental behaviour. Process design is an important means of realising good en well-performing governmental processes. Governments raise specific demands and wishes in the field of process design, such as transparency and justification of policy. The process design method applied should consequently reflect these important aspects of governmental process design. A reasonabl