Abstract
Automated legal reasoning and its application in smart contracts and automated decisions are increasingly attracting interest. In this context, ethical and legal concerns make it necessary for automated reasoners to justify in human-understandable terms the advice given. Logic Programming, specially Answer Set Programming, has a rich semantics and has been used to very concisely express complex knowledge. However, modelling discretionality to act and other vague concepts such as ambiguity cannot be expressed in top-down execution models based on Prolog, and in bottom-up execution models based on ASP the justifications are incomplete and/or not scalable. We propose to use s(CASP), a top-down execution model for predicate ASP, to model vague concepts following a set of patterns. We have implemented a framework, called s(LAW), to model, reason, and justify the applicable legislation and validate it by translating (and benchmarking) a representative use case, the criteria for the admission of students in the “Comunidad de Madrid”.
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Notes
Organic Law 2/2006, May 3, last modified by Organic Law 3/2020, December 29.
Decree 29/2013, of 11 April, amended by Decree 244/2021, of 29 December, of the “Consejo de Gobierno”, on freedom of choice of school in the “Comunidad de Madrid” and updating the admission criteria and their weighting; Order 1240/2013, of 17 April, of the “Departamento de Educación, Juventud y Deportes” of the “Comunidad de Madrid”, amended by Order 1534/2019, of May 17 and by Order 592/2022, of 18 March, of the “Consejería de Educación e Investigación” of the “Comunidad de Madrid”; Resolution of July 31, 2013, of the “Dirección General para la Mejora de la Calidad de la Educación” (in relation to bilingual education); and Joint Resolution of the “Viceconsejería de política educativa” and “Viceconsejería organización educativa” by which instructions are issued to carry out the actions prior to the process of admission of students in centers supported with public funds for the 2022/2023 academic year, of November 25, 2022. (https://www.comunidad.madrid/sites/default/files/doc/educacion/resolucion_conjunta_admision_regimen_general_2023-2024_.pdf).
Preliminary results has been presented by Arias et al. (2021).
We discuss later on that, under different assumptions, students 3 and 4 do not obtain a place.
SDEv4 is available at http://130.56.246.229.
Example available at https://catala-lang.org/en/examples/family-benefits.
In the near future, it may become necessary advance in the direction of the first option as well. In this sense, we note the need to offer mixed curricula, Law and Artificial Intelligence (Rodríguez-García and Moreno-Rebato 2018).
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by grant VAE: TED2021-131295B-C33 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by the “European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR”, by grant COSASS: PID2021-123673OB-C32 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, and by grant 2023/00004/004 s(LAW) funded by URJC.
Funding
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (TED2021-131295B-C33, PID2021-123673OB-C32).
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Arias, J., Moreno-Rebato, M., Rodriguez-García, J.A. et al. Automated legal reasoning with discretion to act using s(LAW). Artif Intell Law (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-023-09376-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-023-09376-5