On Rule Extraction from Regulations
Adam Wyner and Wim Peters

Abstract
Rules in regulations such as found in the US Federal Code of Regulations can be expressed using conditional and deontic rules. Identifying and extracting such rules from the language of the source material would be useful for automating rulebook management and translating into an executable logic. The paper presents a linguistically-oriented, rule-based approach, which is in contrast to a machine learning approach. It outlines use cases, discusses the source materials, reviews the methodology, then provides initial results and future steps.

Populating an Online Consultation Tool
Sarah Pulfrey-Taylor, Emily Henthorn, Katie Atkinson, Adam Wyner, and Trevor Bench-Capon

Abstract
The paper addresses the extraction, formalisation, and presentation of public policy arguments. Arguments are extracted from documents that comment on public policy proposals. Formalising the information from the arguments enables the construction of models and systematic analysis of the arguments. In addition, the arguments are represented in a form suitable for presentation in an online consultation tool. Thus, the forms in the consultation correlate with the formalisation and can be evaluated accordingly. The stages of the process are outlined with reference to a working example.

Shortlink to this page.

By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

At the links below, you can find the slides and hands on materials on GATE for the LEX summer school on Managing Legal Resources in the Semantic Web.

GATE Legislative Rulebook

By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

Overview

The Estrella Project (The European project for Standardized Transparent Representations in order to Extend Legal Accessibility) has developed a platform which allows public administrations to deploy comprehensive solutions for the management of legal knowledge. In reasoning about social benefits or taxation, public administrators must represent and reason with complex legislation. The platform is intended to support the representation of and reasoning about legislation in a way that can help public administrations to improve the quality and efficiency of their services. Moreover, given a suitable interface, the legislation can be made available for the public to interact with. For example, LKIF tools could be made available to citizens via the web to help them to assess their eligibility for a social benefits as well as filling out the appropriate application forms.

The platform has been designed to be open and standardised so that public administrations need not become dependent on proprietary products of particular vendors. Along the same lines, the platform supports interoperability among various components for legal knowledge-based systems allowing public administrations to freely choose among the components. A standardised platform also enables a range of vendors to develop innovative products to suit particular market needs without having to be concerned with an all-encompassing solution, compatibility with other vendors, or being locked out of a strategic market by “monolithic” vendors. As well, the platform abstracts from the expression of legislation in different natural languages so providing a common, abstract legal “lingua franca”.

The main technical achievement of the Estrella Project is the development of a Legal Knowledge Interchange Format (LKIF), which represents legal information in a form which builds upon emerging XML-based standards of the Semantic Web. The project platform provides Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs) for interacting with legal knowledge-based systems using LKIF. LKIF provides formalisms for representing concepts (“ontologies”), inference rules, precedent cases and arguments. An XML document schema for legislation has been developed, called MetaLex, which complements and integrates national XML standards for legislation. This format supports document search, exchange, and association among documents as well as enforces a link between legal sources and the legal knowledge systems which reason about the information in the sources. In addition, a reference inference engine has been developed which supports reasoning with legal knowledge represented in LKIF. The utility of LKIF as an interchange format for legal knowledge has been demonstrated with pilot tests of legal documents which are expressed in proprietary formats of several vendors then translated to and from the format of one vendor to that of another.

Background Context

The Estrella Project originated in the context of European Union integration, where:

• The European Parliament passes EU wide directives which need to be incorporated into or related to the legislation of member states.
• Goods, services, and citizens are free to move across open European borders.
• Democratic institutions must be strengthened as well as be more responsive to the will of the citizenry.
• Public administrations must be more efficient and economical.

In the EU, the legal systems of member states have been composed of heterogeneous, often conflicting, rules and regulations concerning taxes, employment, education, pensions, health care, property, trade, and so on. Integration of new EU legislation with existing legislation of the member states as well as homogenisation of legal systems across the EU has been problematic, complex, and expensive to implement. As the borders of member states open, the rules and regulations concerning the benefits and liabilities of citizens and businesses must move as people, goods, and services move. For example, laws concerning employment and pension ought to be comparable across the member states so as to facilitate the movement of employees across national boundaries. In addition, there are more general concerns about improving the functionality of the legal system so as to garner public support for the legal system, promoting transparency, compliance, and citizen involvement. Finally, the costs of administering the legal system by EU administrative departments, administrations of member states, and companies throughout the EU are signficant and rising. The more complex and dynamic the legislative environment, the more burdensome the costs.

Purposes

Given this background context, the Estrella Project was initiated with the following purposes in mind:

• to facilitate the integration of EU legal systems
• to modernise public administration at the levels of the EU and within member states by supporting efficiency, transparency, accountability, accessibility, inclusiveness, portability, and simplicity of core governmental processes and services
• to improve the quality of legal information by testing legal systems for consistency (are there contradictions between portions of the law) and correctness (is the law achieving the goal it is specied for?).
• to reduce the costs of public administration
• to reduce private sector costs of managing their legal obligations
• to encourage public support for democratic institutions by participation, transparency, and personalisation of services
• to ease the mobility of goods, services, and EU citizens within the EU
• to support businesses across EU member states
• to provide the means to “modularise” the legal systems for different levels of EU legal structure, e.g. provide a “municipal government” module which could be amended to suit local circumstances
• to support a range of governmental and legal processes across organisations and on behalf of citizens and businesses
• to support a variety of reasoning patterns as needed across a range of resources (e.g. directives, legal case bases).

The following people attended:

• Andras Forhecz, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
• Ales Gola, Ministry of Interior of Czech Republic
• Harold Hoffman, University Krems, Austria
• Czeslaw Jedrzejek, Poznan University of Technology, Poland
• Manuel Maarek, INRIA Grenoble, Rhone-Alpes
• Michael Sonntag, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
• Vit Stastny, Ministry of Interior of Czech Republic

I thank the participants for their comments and look forward to continuing the discussions which we started in the tutorial.

At the link, one can find the slides. Comments are very welcome. The file is 2.2MB. The slides were originally prepared using Open Office’s Impress, then converted to PowerPoint.

Natural Language Processing Techniques for Managing Legal Resources on the Semantic Web

There is a bit more in the slides than was presented at the tutorial, covering in addition ontologies, parsers, and semantic interpreters.

In the coming weeks, I will make available additional detailed instructions as well as gazetteers and JAPE rules. I also plan to continue to add additional text mining materials.

By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

Legal resources such as legislation, public notices, and case law are increasingly available on the internet. To be automatically processed by web services, the resources must be annotated using semantic web technologies such as XML, RDF, and ontologies. However, manual annotation is labour and knowledge intensive. Using natural language processing techniques and systems (NLP), a significant portion of these resources can be automatically annotated. In this tutorial, we outline the motivations and objectives of NLP, give an overview of several accessible systems (General Architecture on Text Engineering, C&C/Boxer, Attempto Controlled English), provide examples of processing legal resources, and discuss future directions in this area.

In the course of these discussions, I prepared a short outline of the issues and approaches, which I present below. Comments, suggestions, and collaborations are welcome.

Vision, context, and objectives

One of the main visions of artificial intelligence and law has been to develop a legislative processing tool. Such a tool has several related objectives:

[1.] To guide the drafter to write well-formed legal rules in natural language.
[2.] To automatically parse and semantically represent the rules.
[3.] To automatically identify and annotate the rules so that they can be extracted from a corpus of legislation for web-based applications.
[4.] To enable inference, modeling, and consistency testing with respect to the rules.
[5.] To reason with respect to domain knowledge (an ontology).
[6.] To serve the rules on the web so that users can use natural language to input information and receive determinations.

While no such tool exists, there has been steady progress on understanding the problems and developing working software solutions. In early work (see The British nationality act as a logic program (1986)), an act was manually translated into a program, allowing one to draw inferences given ground facts. Haley is a software and service company which provides a framework which partially addresses 1, 2, 4, and 6 (see Policy Automation). Some research addresses aspects of 3 (see LKIF-Core Ontology). Finally, there are XML annotation schemas for legislation (and related input support) such as The Crown XML Schema for Legislation and Akoma Ntoso, both of which require manual input. Despite these advances, there is much progress yet to be made. In particular, no results fulfill [3.].

In consideration of [3.], the primary objective of this proposal is to use the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) framework in order to automatically identify and annotate legislative rules from a corpus. The annotation should support web-based applications and be consistent with semantic web mark ups for rules, e.g. RuleML. A subsidiary objective is to define an authoring template which can be used within existing authoring applications to manually annotate legislative rules.

Benefits

Attaining these objectives would:

• Support automated creation, maintenance, and distribution of rule books for compliance.
• Contribute to the development of a legislative processing tool.
• Make legislative rules accessible for web-based applications. For example, given other annotations, one could identify rules that apply with respect to particular individuals in an organisation along with relevant dates, locations, etc.
• Enable further processing of the rules such as removing formatting, parsing the content of the rules, and representing them semantically.
• Allow an inference engine to be applied over the formalised rule base.
• Make legislation more transparent and communicable among interested parties such as government departments, EU governments, and citizenry.

Scope

To attain the objectives, we propose the following phases, where the numbers represent weeks of effort:

• Create a relatively small sample corpus to scope the study.
• Manually identify the forms of legislative rules within the corpus.
• Develop or adapt an annotation scheme for rules.
• Apply the analysis tools of GATE and annotate the rules.
• Validate that GATE annotates the rules as intended.
• Apply the annotation system to a larger corpus of documents.

For each section, we would produce a summary of results, noting where difficulties are encountered and ways they might be addressed.

Extending the work

The work can be extended in a variety of ways:

• Apply the GATE rules to a larger corpus with more variety of rule forms.
• Process the rules for semantic representation and inference.
• Take into consideration defeasiblity and exceptions.
• Develop semantic web applications for the rules.

By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

Thanks to Diana Maynard, Danica Damljanovic, Phil Gooch, and the GATE User Manual for comments and materials which I have liberally used. Errors rest with me (and please tell me where they are so I can fix them!).

Purpose

Onto Root Gazetteer links text to an ontology by creating Lookup annotations which come from the ontology rather than a default gazetteer. The ontology is preprocessed to produce a flexible, dynamic gazetteer; that is, it is a gazetteer which takes into account alternative morphological forms and can be added to. An important advantage is that text can be annotated as an individual of the ontology, thus facilitating the population of the ontology.

Besides being flexible and dynamic, some advantages of ORG over other gazetteers:

• It is more richly structured (see it as a gazetteer containing other gazetteers)
• It allows one to relate textual and ontological information by adding instances.
• It gives one richer annotations that can be used for further processes.

In the following, we present the step by step instructions for ‘rolling your own’, then show the results of the ‘prepackaged’ example that comes with the plugin.

Setup

Step 1. Add (if not already used) the Onto Root Gazetteer plugin to GATE following the usual plugin instructions.

Step 2. Add (if not already used) the Ontology Tools (OWLIM Ontology LR, OntoGazetteer, GATE Ontology Editor, OAT) plugin. ORG uses ontologies, so one must have these tools to load them as language resources.

Step 3. Create (or load) an ontology with OWLIM (see the instructions on the ontologies). This is the ontology that is the language resource that is then used by Onto Root Gazetteer. Suppose this ontology is called myOntology. It is important to note that OWLIM can only use OWL-Lite ontologies (see the documentation about this). Also, I succeeded in loading an ontology only from the resources folder of the Ontology_Tools plugin (rather than from another drive); I don’t know if this is significant.

Step 4. In GATE, create processing resources with default parameters:

• Document Reset PR
• RegEx Sentence Splitter (or ANNIE Sentence Splitter, but that one is likely to run slower
• ANNIE English Tokeniser
• ANNIE POS Tagger
• GATE Morphological Analyser

Step 5. When all these PRs are loaded, create a Onto Root Gazetteer PR and set the initial parameters as follows. Mandatory ones are as follows (though some are set as defaults):

• Ontology: select previously created myOntology
• Tokeniser: select previously created Tokeniser
• POSTagger: select previously created POS Tagger
• Morpher: select previously created Morpher.

Step 6. Create another PR which is a Flexible Gazetteer. At the initial parameters, it is mandatory to select previously created OntoRootGazetteer for gazetteerInst. For another parameter, inputFeatureNames, click on the button on the right and when prompt with a window, add ‘Token.root’ in the provided text box, then click Add button. Click OK, give name to the new PR (optional) and then click OK.

Step 7. To create an application, right click on Application, New –> Pipeline (or Corpus Pipeline). Add the following PRS to the application in this order:

• Document Reset PR
• RegEx Sentence Splitter
• ANNIE English Tokeniser
• ANNIE POS Tagger
• GATE Morphological Analyser
• Flexible Gazetteer

Step 8. Run the application over the selected corpus.

Step 9. Inspect the results. Look at the Annotation Set with Lookup and also the Annotation List to see how the annotations appear.

Small Example

The ORG plugin comes with a demo application which not only sets up all the PRs and LRs (the text, corpus, and ontology), but also the application ready to run. This is the file exampleApp.xgapp, which is in resource folder of the plugin (Ontology_Based_Gazetteer). To start this, start GATE with a clean slate (no other PRs, LRs, or applications), then Applications, then right click to Restore application from file, then load the file from the folder just given.

The ontology which is used for an illustration is for GATE itself, giving the classes, subclasses, and instances of the system. While the ontology is loaded along with the application, one can find it here. The text is simple (and comes with the application): language resources and parameters.

FIGURE 1 (missing at the moment)

FIGURE 2 (missing at the moment)

One can see that the token “language resources” is annotated with respect to the class LanguageResource, “resources” is annotated with GATEResource, and “parameters” is annotated with ResourceParameter. We discuss this further below.

One further aspect is important and useful. Since the ontology tools have been loaded and a particular ontology has been used, one can not only see the ontology (open the OAT tab in the window with the text), but one can annotate the text with respect to the ontology — highlight some text and a popup menu allows one to select how to annotate the text. With this, one can add instances (or classes) to the ontology.

Documentation

One can consult the following for further information about how the gazetteer is made, among other topics:

• GATE User Manual on Onto Root Gazetteer.
• See section 3.1. of this paper.
• See section 4 of TAO Deliverables.
• See Peters and Maynard in A GATE-way into NeON.

Discussion

See the related post Discussion of GATE’s Onto Root Gazetteer.

By Adam Wyner
Distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0

The GLA is in the process of scoping a datastore for information London. The objective is to begin to encourage development of “government 2.0″ using open government data along the lines of what has been done in San Franscisco in the US (see an article on DataSF and a post by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom). The principle idea is that by putting data of public interest into the public domain, the government can provide the basis for development of applications and services for the government, business community, and public. For example, using police data, one can generate crime maps.

At the GLA meeting, the objective was to meet with the developer community to get ideas and feedback on what and how the data should be released as well as how best to encourage applications in the near future.

Clearly, the GLA meeting is along the lines of what is happening elsewhere in the UK government (see Digital Engagement at the Cabinet Office, the Office of Public Sector Information, and The Stationery Office).

There were some 70 participants at the meeting, and we can look forward to further information coming from the organisers at the GLA. Some very useful suggestions where made about where to get further information such as the Technology Strategy Board which supports technology development in the UK.

Among the topics of discussion where:

• What sort of data should be released and in what form? There were those who wanted it raw and those who wanted it structured. Likely releasing it both forms will occur.
• How to get licensing for the data? There are a host of difficult issues here, as most of the data is owned or copyrighted by a range of organisations, each of whom wants to control the flow of information, profit from it, or has concerns about security/liability. Moreover, the government contracts information service providers, which process the data, may have some legal claim. Such providers may be required to make their data open.
• How would the data be used? There were many suggestions about data reuse and mash up, mostly along the lines of existing applications such as mapping data to physical maps in order to get ideas about what is happening where in neighborhoods, transportation assistance, information access in a local area, and so on.
• Who would develop the applications and how would development be funded? Clearly there is an issue about funding, but some of the ways around it are to leverage funding between academic, government, and business communities.
• Who to consult about applications? A range of parties might be consulted about what they would find useful, from the person on the street, to members of service organisations (police, licensing, etc), to higher level government organisations. Alternative, the GLA or similar organisations might develop applications which they thought would be useful, then provide them to the public. Here, the focus would be on small, manageable, pilot projects to show proof of concept.

The discussion was very nicely organised and led — several large tables around a circle, several large monitors, several boards for writing, an MC who kept things moving along, and a good overall atmosphere. However, missing were a list of participants, contact information, and a short (three sentence) statement of interest; hopefully, all this will appear soon.

This is all very interesting and exciting, for things are just beginning to happen. However, I have some concerns and realise I have a somewhat different focus.

• There were too few participants from government services and academia. This is also reflected in the gap between the technology and the data, since it is highly unclear who is developing what for whom and what purpose? It is hard to get a handle on how data should be served without some sense of goals. Nonetheless, likely there will be another meet-up at which this more substantive discussion will happen.
• There was only passing mention of ontologies, annotation, information extraction, and the semantic web. The absence of semantic web concepts suggests that “reasoning” and complex information management is not high on the agenda. This is consistent with the family of application ideas (graphs, maps, local information). While I was told that there were ontologies via OPSI, this is not what I understood from John Sheridan in my recent discussion, so I will be eager to see exactly what this is.
• Similarly, there was some discussion about whether there should be or could be standards and schemas for the data. These are always compatible (make them both available), but I see standards are essential for any communication across agencies and localities. There are drawbacks to standards development, but the issue will arise sooner or later in any case.
• There is, as yet, no the pitch. In other words, what is the incentive for anyone to make their data available or for organisations to otherwise cooperate with this endeavour? The only mentions of incentive were government obligation, but this is perhaps the most heavy handed way to make headway. Rather, there should be positive incentives. In addition, the eGovernment agenda should be pushed (e.g. transparency, support for government, participation, efficiency, cost reduction, consistency….).
• There was little discussion of exactly which technologies would be used though RDF/XML and REST were mentioned. These are generic and widespread; is the real hangup right now data access, or is there some technological issue? If I wanted to know what I should need to know to program and provide a simple service, what would I have to know and do?
• Despite the widespread interest in government 2.0, there is little vertical/horizontal integration or communication among the interested parties. There is not, apparently, a coherent website or ‘state of the art’ article with links to the relevant data/functionalities/support organisations.
• There was no over-arching conception of design or context for applications. Likely some sort of ‘apps’ or plugins framework will emerge so that, for example, a local council would build none of its own applications or services, but these would be provided as plugins by independent providers, yet given a consistent style and structure.
• Though there are claims that there have been consultations about government 2.0 with the various interested parties, there is no clear presentation of the results of those consultations. A ‘brain-storming’ site would be very useful.
• It is unclear to me the extent to which the participants have the political/social context in mind. While we were hosted by the GLA and discussed GLA data, the opportunities, limitations, requirements, and objectives of government seem to have entirely overlooked. For example, government is successful (not always, but often) with making and monitoring standards for the public good; as elsewhere, why not here? The requirements of government information provision are different than for commercial provision, especially since the government provides goods and services that would not otherwise be profitable. The government does consult with the public and interested parties in making policy, but in some cases it is crucial that government lead and direct developments; the government is not simply another commerical provider of goods and services, driven by consumer interests; the government has a legislative role. Keeping this in mind may change the sorts of proposals that come out from open GLA data
• There were several discussions about why and how government data should be published. The main points ought to be developed, discussed further, and summarised. Yet, it ought also be pointed out that there is, in the UK, an abundance of information that the government holds about individuals; it is unclear how a ‘firewall’ to protect and promote civil liberties will be set up and maintained; privacy and rights are in fact rather weak in the UK. For example, the NHS is state funded and one might argue certain matters are in the public interest, so open information issues may arise here: will we have ‘disease’ mashups such as there are for broken lamp-posts, but in this case for drug addicts, HIV carriers, swine flu, etc?
• I am particularly interested in legal reasoning, but this is not something on the agenda with respect to this data.

In any case, there is much of interest here and much to look forward to.

Cheers,
Adam Wyner

Copyright © 2009 Adam Wyner

Copyright © 2009 Adam Wyner