Wyner on Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science has published Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 39-41.

Here is the abstract:

Legislation and regulations are expressed in natural language. Machine-readable forms of the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translation to a logic. The paper considers the latter form, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a machine-readable logic, sentences must be parsed and semantically translated. Manual translation is time and labour intensive, usually involving narrowly scoping the rules. While automated translation systems have made significant progress, problems remain. The paper outlines systems to automatically translate legislative clauses to a semantic representation, highlighting key problems and proposing some tasks to address them.

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