M ihály D om bi-István K u tiP éter B alo g h: Interpretation o f sustainability in the utilizati... more M ihály D om bi-István K u tiP éter B alo g h: Interpretation o f sustainability in the utilization o f renewable energy sources..
The aim of the research is to semi-automate the process of generating formal specifications from ... more The aim of the research is to semi-automate the process of generating formal specifications from legal contracts in natural language text form. Towards this end, the paper presents a tool, named ContrattoA, that semi-automatically conducts semantic annotation of legal contract text using an ontology for legal contracts. ContrattoA was developed through two iterations where lexical patterns were defined for legal concepts and their effectiveness was evaluated with experiments. The first iteration was based on a handful of sample contracts and resulted in defining lexical patterns for recognizing concepts in the ontology; these were evaluated with an empirical study where one group of subjects was asked to annotate legal text manually, while a second group edited the annotations generated by ContrattoA. The second iteration focused on the lexical patterns for the core contract concepts of obligation and power where results of the first iteration were mixed. On the basis of an extended...
Legal contracts have been used for millennia to conduct business transactions world-wide. Such co... more Legal contracts have been used for millennia to conduct business transactions world-wide. Such contracts are expressed in natural language, and usually come in written form. We are interested in producing formal specifications from such legal text that can be used to formally analyze contracts, also serve as launching pad for generating smart contracts, information systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution of legal contracts. We have been developing a method for transforming legal contract documents into specifications, adopting a semantic approach where transformation is treated as a text classification, rather than a natural language processing problem. The method consists of five steps that (a) Identify domain terms in the contract and manually disambiguate them when necessary, in consultation with stakeholders; (b) Semantically annotate text identifying obligations, powers, contracting parties, assets and situations; (c) Identify relationships among the concepts mined in (b); (d) Generate a domain model based on the terms identified in (a), as well as parameters and local variables for the contract; (e) Generate expressions that formalize the conditions of obligations and powers using terms identified in earlier steps in a contract specification language. This paper presents the method through an illustrative example, also reports on a prototype implementation of an environment that supports the method.
Growth in electronic commerce has enabled businesses to reduce costs and expand markets by deploy... more Growth in electronic commerce has enabled businesses to reduce costs and expand markets by deploying information technology through new and existing business practices. However, government laws and regulations require businesses to employ reasonable security measures to thwart risks associated with this technology. Because many security vulnerabilities are only discovered after attacker exploitation, regulators update their interpretation of reasonable security to stay current with emerging threats. With a focus on determining what businesses must do to comply with these changing interpretations of the law, we conducted an empirical, multi-case study to discover and measure the meaning and evolution of "reasonable" security by examining 19 regulatory enforcement actions by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over a 10 year period. The results reveal trends in FTC enforcement actions that are institutionalizing security knowledge as evidenced by 39 security requirements that mitigate 110 legal security vulnerabilities.
Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution o... more Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution of legal contracts. The requirements of such systems consist of a formal specification of the legal contract whose execution is to be monitored and controlled. Legal contracts are always available as text expressed in natural language. We have been working on the translation of such text documents into formal specifications. Our translation process consists of four steps that (a) Semantic annotation of text identifying obligations, powers, contracting parties and assets, (b) Identification of relationships among the concepts identified in (a), (c) Generation of a domain model for terms used in the contract, as well as identification of parameters and local variables for the contract, (d) Generation of formal expressions that formalize the constituents of obligations and powers. This paper reports on the status of the project and the results that have been achieved.
Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements an... more Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements and constrain existing ones. The analysis of a software system and the degree to which it complies with applicable laws can be greatly facilitated by models of applicable laws. However, laws are inherently voluminous, often consisting of hundreds of pages of text, and so are their models, consisting of thousands of concepts and relationships. This paper studies the possibility of building models of law semi-automatically by using the NomosT tool. Specifically, we present the NomosT architecture and the process by which a user constructs a model of law semi-automatically, by first annotating the text of a law and then generating from it a model. We then evaluate the performance of the tool relative to building a model of a piece of law manually. In addition, we offer statistics on the quality of the final output that suggest that tool supported generation of models of law reduces substantially human effort without affecting the quality of the output.
Abstract—In this paper we describe the architecture and application of GaiusT, a multi-phase fram... more Abstract—In this paper we describe the architecture and application of GaiusT, a multi-phase framework for extracting requirements from legal documents. GaiusT aims to cover the extraction process from the very first steps, pre-processing the input texts and supporting structural and semantic annotation of legal documents. The annotated information is recorded in a database facilitating both retrieval and evaluation of the results. Existing linguistic tools and resources have been applied whenever possible. A post-analysis of the ongoing implementation of the modules in the GaiusT architecture is given as a preliminary understanding of how much existing tools can be adopted and how much they had to be adapted. Keywords-requirements elicitation; support systems; conceptual model; annotation schema; semantic annotation I. USERS OF GAIUST
Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution o... more Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution of legal contracts. The requirements of such systems consist of a formal specification of the legal contract whose execution is to be monitored and controlled. Legal contracts are always available as text expressed in natural language. We have been working on the translation of such text documents into formal specifications. Our translation process consists of four steps that (a) Semantic annotation of text identifying obligations, powers, contracting parties and assets, (b) Identification of relationships among the concepts identified in (a), (c) Generation of a domain model for terms used in the contract, as well as identification of parameters and local variables for the contract, (d) Generation of formal expressions that formalize the constituents of obligations and powers. This paper reports on the status of the project and the results that have been achieved.
The Web is the greatest information source in human history. Unfortunately, mining knowledge out ... more The Web is the greatest information source in human history. Unfortunately, mining knowledge out of this source is a laborious and errorprone task. Many researchers believe that a solution to the problem can be founded on semantic annotations that need to be inserted in web-based documents and guide information extraction and knowledge mining. In this paper, we further elaborate a tool-supported process for semantic annotation of documents based on techniques and technologies traditionally used in software analysis and reverse engineering for large-scale legacy code bases. The outcomes of the paper include an experimental evaluation framework and empirical results based on two case studies adopted from the Tourism sector. The conclusions suggest that our approach can facilitate the semi-automatic annotation of large document bases.
Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements an... more Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements and constrain existing ones. The analysis of a software system and the degree to which it complies with applicable laws can be greatly facilitated by models of applicable laws. However, laws are inherently voluminous, often consisting of hundreds of pages of text, and so are their models, consisting of thousands of concepts and relationships. This paper studies the possibility of building models of law semi-automatically by using the NomosT tool. Specifically, we present the NomosT architecture and the process by which a user constructs a model of law semi-automatically, by first annotating the text of a law and then generating from it a model. We then evaluate the performance of the tool relative to building a model of a piece of law manually. In addition, we offer statistics on the quality of the final output that suggest that tool supported generation of models of law reduces substantia...
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2020
We are interested in semi-automating the process of generating a formal specification from a lega... more We are interested in semi-automating the process of generating a formal specification from a legal contract in natural language text form. Towards this end, we present a tool, named ContracT, that annotates legal contract text using an ontology for legal contracts. In the last part of the paper, we present results from a preliminary empirical evaluation of the tool that provided encouraging results in identifying contract concepts in text and discuss critical points to be tackled in future studies.
Abstract. Semantic annotation of the web documents is the only way to make the Semantic Web visio... more Abstract. Semantic annotation of the web documents is the only way to make the Semantic Web vision a reality. Considering the scale and dynamics of worldwide web, the largest knowledge base ever built, it becomes clear that we cannot afford to annotate web documents manually. In this work we propose a generic domain-independent architecture for semi-automatic semantic annotation, basing on the lightweight and robust techniques, proven effective in source code processing for software analysis field. We demonstrate ...
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2008
Government regulations are increasingly affecting the security, privacy and governance of informa... more Government regulations are increasingly affecting the security, privacy and governance of information systems in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Consequently, companies and software developers are required to ensure that their software systems comply with relevant regulations, either through design or re-engineering. We previously proposed a methodology for extracting stakeholder requirements, called rights and obligations, from regulations. In this paper, we examine the challenges to developing tool support for this methodology using the Cerno framework for textual semantic annotation. We present the results from two empirical evaluations of a tool called "Gaius T" that is implemented using the Cerno framework and that extracts a conceptual model from regulatory texts. The evaluation, carried out on the U.S. HIPAA Privacy Rule and the Italian accessibility law, measures the quality of the produced models and the tool's effectiveness in reducing the human effort to derive requirements from regulations.
Abstract Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requir... more Abstract Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements and constrain existing ones. The analysis of a software system and the degree to which it complies with applicable laws can be greatly facilitated by models of applicable laws. However, laws are inherently voluminous, often consisting of hundreds of pages of text, and so are their models, consisting of thousands of concepts and relationships. This paper studies the possibility of building models of law semi-automatically by using the NomosT tool. Specifically, we present the NomosT architecture and the process by which a user constructs a model of law semi-automatically, by first annotating the text of a law and then generating from it a model. We then evaluate the performance of the tool relative to building a model of a fragment of law manually. In addition, we offer statistics on the quality of the final output that suggest that tool supported generation of models of law reduces substantially human effort without affecting the quality of the output.
Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution o... more Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution of legal contracts. The requirements of such systems consist of a formal specification of the legal contract whose execution is to be monitored and controlled. Legal contracts are always available as text expressed in natural language. We have been working on the translation of such text documents into formal specifications. Our translation process consists of four steps that (a) Semantic annotation of text identifying obligations, powers, contracting parties and assets, (b) Identification of relationships among the concepts identified in (a), (c) Generation of a domain model for terms used in the contract, as well as identification of parameters and local variables for the contract, (d) Generation of formal expressions that formalize the constituents of obligations and powers. This paper reports on the status of the project and the results that have been achieved.
The Practice of Enterprise Modeling. PoEM 2020, 2020
We are interested in semi-automating the process of generating a formal specification from a lega... more We are interested in semi-automating the process of generating a formal specification from a legal contract in natural language text form. Towards this end, we present a tool, named ContracT, that annotates legal contract text using an ontology for legal contracts. In the last part of the paper, we present results from a preliminary empirical evaluation of the tool that provided encouraging results in identifying contract concepts in text and discuss critical points to be tackled in future studies.
Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, 2004
This paper presents the results of three experiments designed to assess the extent to which a Nat... more This paper presents the results of three experiments designed to assess the extent to which a Natural-Language Processing (NLP) tool improves the quality of conceptual models, specifically object-oriented ones. Our main experimental hypothesis is that the quality of a domain class model is higher if its development is supported by a NLP system. The tool used for the experiment���named NL-OOPS���extracts classes and associations from a knowledge base realized by a deep semantic analysis of a sample text. In our ...
International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies
We present the GaiusT 2.0 framework for annotating legal documents. The framework was designed an... more We present the GaiusT 2.0 framework for annotating legal documents. The framework was designed and implemented as a web-based system to semi-automate the extraction of legal concepts from text. In requirements analysis these concepts can be used to identify requirements a software system has to fulfil to comply with a law or regulation. The analysis and annotation of legal documents in prescriptive natural language is still an open problem for research in the field. In GaiusT 2.0, a multistep process exploits a number of linguistic and technological resources to offer a comprehensive annotation environment. The modules of the system are presented as evolutions from corresponding modules of the original GaiusT framework, which in turn was based on a general-purpose annotation tool, Cerno. The application of GaiusT 2.0 is illustrated with two use cases, to demonstrate the extraction process and its adaptability to different law models.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2016
Semantic annotation technologies support the extraction of legal concepts, for example rights and... more Semantic annotation technologies support the extraction of legal concepts, for example rights and obligations, from legal documents. For software engineers, the final goal is to identify compliance requirements a software system has to fulfill in order to comply with a law or regulation. That implies analyzing and annotating legal documents in prescriptive natural language, still an open problem for research in the field. In this paper we describe GaiusT 2.0, a system for extracting requirements from legal documents. GaiusT 2.0 is the result of the evolution of GaiusT, and has been designed and implemented as a web-based system intended to semi-automate the extraction process. Results of the application of GaiusT 2.0 show that the new version improves performance of the extraction process and also makes the tool more usable.
M ihály D om bi-István K u tiP éter B alo g h: Interpretation o f sustainability in the utilizati... more M ihály D om bi-István K u tiP éter B alo g h: Interpretation o f sustainability in the utilization o f renewable energy sources..
The aim of the research is to semi-automate the process of generating formal specifications from ... more The aim of the research is to semi-automate the process of generating formal specifications from legal contracts in natural language text form. Towards this end, the paper presents a tool, named ContrattoA, that semi-automatically conducts semantic annotation of legal contract text using an ontology for legal contracts. ContrattoA was developed through two iterations where lexical patterns were defined for legal concepts and their effectiveness was evaluated with experiments. The first iteration was based on a handful of sample contracts and resulted in defining lexical patterns for recognizing concepts in the ontology; these were evaluated with an empirical study where one group of subjects was asked to annotate legal text manually, while a second group edited the annotations generated by ContrattoA. The second iteration focused on the lexical patterns for the core contract concepts of obligation and power where results of the first iteration were mixed. On the basis of an extended...
Legal contracts have been used for millennia to conduct business transactions world-wide. Such co... more Legal contracts have been used for millennia to conduct business transactions world-wide. Such contracts are expressed in natural language, and usually come in written form. We are interested in producing formal specifications from such legal text that can be used to formally analyze contracts, also serve as launching pad for generating smart contracts, information systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution of legal contracts. We have been developing a method for transforming legal contract documents into specifications, adopting a semantic approach where transformation is treated as a text classification, rather than a natural language processing problem. The method consists of five steps that (a) Identify domain terms in the contract and manually disambiguate them when necessary, in consultation with stakeholders; (b) Semantically annotate text identifying obligations, powers, contracting parties, assets and situations; (c) Identify relationships among the concepts mined in (b); (d) Generate a domain model based on the terms identified in (a), as well as parameters and local variables for the contract; (e) Generate expressions that formalize the conditions of obligations and powers using terms identified in earlier steps in a contract specification language. This paper presents the method through an illustrative example, also reports on a prototype implementation of an environment that supports the method.
Growth in electronic commerce has enabled businesses to reduce costs and expand markets by deploy... more Growth in electronic commerce has enabled businesses to reduce costs and expand markets by deploying information technology through new and existing business practices. However, government laws and regulations require businesses to employ reasonable security measures to thwart risks associated with this technology. Because many security vulnerabilities are only discovered after attacker exploitation, regulators update their interpretation of reasonable security to stay current with emerging threats. With a focus on determining what businesses must do to comply with these changing interpretations of the law, we conducted an empirical, multi-case study to discover and measure the meaning and evolution of "reasonable" security by examining 19 regulatory enforcement actions by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over a 10 year period. The results reveal trends in FTC enforcement actions that are institutionalizing security knowledge as evidenced by 39 security requirements that mitigate 110 legal security vulnerabilities.
Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution o... more Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution of legal contracts. The requirements of such systems consist of a formal specification of the legal contract whose execution is to be monitored and controlled. Legal contracts are always available as text expressed in natural language. We have been working on the translation of such text documents into formal specifications. Our translation process consists of four steps that (a) Semantic annotation of text identifying obligations, powers, contracting parties and assets, (b) Identification of relationships among the concepts identified in (a), (c) Generation of a domain model for terms used in the contract, as well as identification of parameters and local variables for the contract, (d) Generation of formal expressions that formalize the constituents of obligations and powers. This paper reports on the status of the project and the results that have been achieved.
Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements an... more Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements and constrain existing ones. The analysis of a software system and the degree to which it complies with applicable laws can be greatly facilitated by models of applicable laws. However, laws are inherently voluminous, often consisting of hundreds of pages of text, and so are their models, consisting of thousands of concepts and relationships. This paper studies the possibility of building models of law semi-automatically by using the NomosT tool. Specifically, we present the NomosT architecture and the process by which a user constructs a model of law semi-automatically, by first annotating the text of a law and then generating from it a model. We then evaluate the performance of the tool relative to building a model of a piece of law manually. In addition, we offer statistics on the quality of the final output that suggest that tool supported generation of models of law reduces substantially human effort without affecting the quality of the output.
Abstract—In this paper we describe the architecture and application of GaiusT, a multi-phase fram... more Abstract—In this paper we describe the architecture and application of GaiusT, a multi-phase framework for extracting requirements from legal documents. GaiusT aims to cover the extraction process from the very first steps, pre-processing the input texts and supporting structural and semantic annotation of legal documents. The annotated information is recorded in a database facilitating both retrieval and evaluation of the results. Existing linguistic tools and resources have been applied whenever possible. A post-analysis of the ongoing implementation of the modules in the GaiusT architecture is given as a preliminary understanding of how much existing tools can be adopted and how much they had to be adapted. Keywords-requirements elicitation; support systems; conceptual model; annotation schema; semantic annotation I. USERS OF GAIUST
Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution o... more Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution of legal contracts. The requirements of such systems consist of a formal specification of the legal contract whose execution is to be monitored and controlled. Legal contracts are always available as text expressed in natural language. We have been working on the translation of such text documents into formal specifications. Our translation process consists of four steps that (a) Semantic annotation of text identifying obligations, powers, contracting parties and assets, (b) Identification of relationships among the concepts identified in (a), (c) Generation of a domain model for terms used in the contract, as well as identification of parameters and local variables for the contract, (d) Generation of formal expressions that formalize the constituents of obligations and powers. This paper reports on the status of the project and the results that have been achieved.
The Web is the greatest information source in human history. Unfortunately, mining knowledge out ... more The Web is the greatest information source in human history. Unfortunately, mining knowledge out of this source is a laborious and errorprone task. Many researchers believe that a solution to the problem can be founded on semantic annotations that need to be inserted in web-based documents and guide information extraction and knowledge mining. In this paper, we further elaborate a tool-supported process for semantic annotation of documents based on techniques and technologies traditionally used in software analysis and reverse engineering for large-scale legacy code bases. The outcomes of the paper include an experimental evaluation framework and empirical results based on two case studies adopted from the Tourism sector. The conclusions suggest that our approach can facilitate the semi-automatic annotation of large document bases.
Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements an... more Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements and constrain existing ones. The analysis of a software system and the degree to which it complies with applicable laws can be greatly facilitated by models of applicable laws. However, laws are inherently voluminous, often consisting of hundreds of pages of text, and so are their models, consisting of thousands of concepts and relationships. This paper studies the possibility of building models of law semi-automatically by using the NomosT tool. Specifically, we present the NomosT architecture and the process by which a user constructs a model of law semi-automatically, by first annotating the text of a law and then generating from it a model. We then evaluate the performance of the tool relative to building a model of a piece of law manually. In addition, we offer statistics on the quality of the final output that suggest that tool supported generation of models of law reduces substantia...
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2020
We are interested in semi-automating the process of generating a formal specification from a lega... more We are interested in semi-automating the process of generating a formal specification from a legal contract in natural language text form. Towards this end, we present a tool, named ContracT, that annotates legal contract text using an ontology for legal contracts. In the last part of the paper, we present results from a preliminary empirical evaluation of the tool that provided encouraging results in identifying contract concepts in text and discuss critical points to be tackled in future studies.
Abstract. Semantic annotation of the web documents is the only way to make the Semantic Web visio... more Abstract. Semantic annotation of the web documents is the only way to make the Semantic Web vision a reality. Considering the scale and dynamics of worldwide web, the largest knowledge base ever built, it becomes clear that we cannot afford to annotate web documents manually. In this work we propose a generic domain-independent architecture for semi-automatic semantic annotation, basing on the lightweight and robust techniques, proven effective in source code processing for software analysis field. We demonstrate ...
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2008
Government regulations are increasingly affecting the security, privacy and governance of informa... more Government regulations are increasingly affecting the security, privacy and governance of information systems in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Consequently, companies and software developers are required to ensure that their software systems comply with relevant regulations, either through design or re-engineering. We previously proposed a methodology for extracting stakeholder requirements, called rights and obligations, from regulations. In this paper, we examine the challenges to developing tool support for this methodology using the Cerno framework for textual semantic annotation. We present the results from two empirical evaluations of a tool called "Gaius T" that is implemented using the Cerno framework and that extracts a conceptual model from regulatory texts. The evaluation, carried out on the U.S. HIPAA Privacy Rule and the Italian accessibility law, measures the quality of the produced models and the tool's effectiveness in reducing the human effort to derive requirements from regulations.
Abstract Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requir... more Abstract Laws and regulations impact the design of software systems, as they introduce new requirements and constrain existing ones. The analysis of a software system and the degree to which it complies with applicable laws can be greatly facilitated by models of applicable laws. However, laws are inherently voluminous, often consisting of hundreds of pages of text, and so are their models, consisting of thousands of concepts and relationships. This paper studies the possibility of building models of law semi-automatically by using the NomosT tool. Specifically, we present the NomosT architecture and the process by which a user constructs a model of law semi-automatically, by first annotating the text of a law and then generating from it a model. We then evaluate the performance of the tool relative to building a model of a fragment of law manually. In addition, we offer statistics on the quality of the final output that suggest that tool supported generation of models of law reduces substantially human effort without affecting the quality of the output.
Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution o... more Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution of legal contracts. The requirements of such systems consist of a formal specification of the legal contract whose execution is to be monitored and controlled. Legal contracts are always available as text expressed in natural language. We have been working on the translation of such text documents into formal specifications. Our translation process consists of four steps that (a) Semantic annotation of text identifying obligations, powers, contracting parties and assets, (b) Identification of relationships among the concepts identified in (a), (c) Generation of a domain model for terms used in the contract, as well as identification of parameters and local variables for the contract, (d) Generation of formal expressions that formalize the constituents of obligations and powers. This paper reports on the status of the project and the results that have been achieved.
The Practice of Enterprise Modeling. PoEM 2020, 2020
We are interested in semi-automating the process of generating a formal specification from a lega... more We are interested in semi-automating the process of generating a formal specification from a legal contract in natural language text form. Towards this end, we present a tool, named ContracT, that annotates legal contract text using an ontology for legal contracts. In the last part of the paper, we present results from a preliminary empirical evaluation of the tool that provided encouraging results in identifying contract concepts in text and discuss critical points to be tackled in future studies.
Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, 2004
This paper presents the results of three experiments designed to assess the extent to which a Nat... more This paper presents the results of three experiments designed to assess the extent to which a Natural-Language Processing (NLP) tool improves the quality of conceptual models, specifically object-oriented ones. Our main experimental hypothesis is that the quality of a domain class model is higher if its development is supported by a NLP system. The tool used for the experiment���named NL-OOPS���extracts classes and associations from a knowledge base realized by a deep semantic analysis of a sample text. In our ...
International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies
We present the GaiusT 2.0 framework for annotating legal documents. The framework was designed an... more We present the GaiusT 2.0 framework for annotating legal documents. The framework was designed and implemented as a web-based system to semi-automate the extraction of legal concepts from text. In requirements analysis these concepts can be used to identify requirements a software system has to fulfil to comply with a law or regulation. The analysis and annotation of legal documents in prescriptive natural language is still an open problem for research in the field. In GaiusT 2.0, a multistep process exploits a number of linguistic and technological resources to offer a comprehensive annotation environment. The modules of the system are presented as evolutions from corresponding modules of the original GaiusT framework, which in turn was based on a general-purpose annotation tool, Cerno. The application of GaiusT 2.0 is illustrated with two use cases, to demonstrate the extraction process and its adaptability to different law models.
Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2016
Semantic annotation technologies support the extraction of legal concepts, for example rights and... more Semantic annotation technologies support the extraction of legal concepts, for example rights and obligations, from legal documents. For software engineers, the final goal is to identify compliance requirements a software system has to fulfill in order to comply with a law or regulation. That implies analyzing and annotating legal documents in prescriptive natural language, still an open problem for research in the field. In this paper we describe GaiusT 2.0, a system for extracting requirements from legal documents. GaiusT 2.0 is the result of the evolution of GaiusT, and has been designed and implemented as a web-based system intended to semi-automate the extraction process. Results of the application of GaiusT 2.0 show that the new version improves performance of the extraction process and also makes the tool more usable.
Conceptual models are used in a variety of areas within Computer Science, including Software Engi... more Conceptual models are used in a variety of areas within Computer Science, including Software Engineering, Databases and AI. A major bottleneck in broadening their applicability is the time it takes to build a conceptual model for a new application. Not surprisingly, a variety of tools and techniques have been proposed for reusing conceptual models, e.g. ontologies, or for building them semi-automatically from natural language (NL) descriptions. What has been left largely unexplored is the impact of such tools on the quality of the models that are being created. This paper presents the results of three experiments designed to assess the extent to which a Natural-Language Processing (NLP) tool improves the quality of conceptual models, specifically object-oriented ones. Our main experimental hypothesis is that the quality of a domain class model is higher if its development is supported by a NLP system. The tool used for the experiment – named NL-OOPS – extracts classes and associations from a knowledge base realized by a deep semantic analysis of a sample text. Specifically, NL-OOPS produces class models at different levels of detail by exploiting class hierarchies in the knowledge base of a NLP system and marks ambiguities in the text. In our experiments, we had groups working with and without the tool, and then compared and evaluated the final class models they produced. The results of the experiments – the first on this topic – give insights on the state of the art of linguistics-based Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools and allow identifying important guidelines to improve their performance. In particular it was possible …
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Papers by Nicola Zeni