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Logic in the Theory and Practice of Lawmaking pp 409–434Cite as

From the Language of Legislation to Executable Logic Programs

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Part of the book series: Legisprudence Library ((LEGIS,volume 2))

Abstract

Starting in the 1980s with the British Nationality Act 1981, there have been efforts to represent legislation as executable logic programs. With such programs, the objective is to draw inferences given base facts, test alternative scenarios, check the representation (and law) for consistency, serve the legislation as web-pages on the internet, and electronically transmit the law. Early work was entirely manual. More recently, tools that use controlled natural language have been applied. Generally, such tools require that the language of the legislation is manually scoped and revised to suit a controlled language (a fixed subset of the vocabulary and grammar of the natural language), which constrains the applicability of the tools and filters out information. More recently, well-developed, large scale parsers with related logical representations have been applied to legislation, overcoming manual preprocessing. On the other hand, it requires significant post-processing analysis to check the output. In this paper, we discuss the background, state-of-the-art, problems, and future directions in the translation of natural language legislation to a formal, logical representation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Disclosure: Oracle Office Rules are a product of Oracle and are based on products from Haley (formerly RuleBurst, formerly SoftLaw); the author was a research partner on a project which involved Haley, and he received a training certificate in the application of the technology.

  2. 2.

    Much of this section previously appears as a subsection in Wyner (2012).

  3. 3.

    http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1981/61/contents

  4. 4.

    A parser gives a grammatical analysis, identifying the nouns, verbs, and so on of a sentence as well as the grammatical relations such as subject and object of the verb. A semantic interpreter provides a translation of the sentence into a logic, e.g. “Some man is happy” is translated to \(\exists\) x [man(x) & happy(x)].

  5. 5.

    This section is based on Wyner and Peters (2011).

  6. 6.

    See in general: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cfr/index.html The citation to the regulation is 21CFR610.40. Search for regulations in https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm

  7. 7.

    This section is based on Wyner and van Engers (2010) and Wyner et al. (2010b).

  8. 8.

    http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/description/

  9. 9.

    We discuss several of these later. However, while most of ACE is first order, the modals (“must”, “can”, “should”, and “may”) and verbs which take a sentential complement (e.g. “say”) are not semantically interpretable.

  10. 10.

    Automated reasoning with modal logic is under active development. See http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~schmidt/tools/ on various tools and related literature.

  11. 11.

    This section is based on Wyner et al. (2012).

  12. 12.

    With the \(\lambda\)-calculus, one can specify parts and the way the parts functionally and systematically combine.

  13. 13.

    The figure is not intended to be legible, but only to give a sense of how the analysis proceeds by layers that combine simple units to more complex units. Given the scale, the image is either too hard to read or too big to present.

  14. 14.

    A gold standard corpus is a corpus that is intended to be correct by consensus of the annotators of the texts.

  15. 15.

    For these various constructions, it is useful to look at introductory textbooks (Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 2000).

  16. 16.

    The commas around the interjection are relevant to parsing, so added to the source text.

  17. 17.

    Respectively, http://www.akomantoso.org/ and https://www.tso.co.uk/our-expertise/case-studies/national-archives-wwwlegislationgovuk

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

    Adam Wyner

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  1. Adam Wyner
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Correspondence to Adam Wyner .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Legal Theory, Jagiellonian University Faculty of Law and Administration, Kraków, Poland

    Michał Araszkiewicz

  2. Department of Legal Theory, Jagiellonian University Faculty of Law and Administration, Kraków, Poland

    Krzysztof Płeszka

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Wyner, A. (2015). From the Language of Legislation to Executable Logic Programs. In: Araszkiewicz, M., Płeszka, K. (eds) Logic in the Theory and Practice of Lawmaking. Legisprudence Library, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19575-9_15

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