A Web-Based Tool for Analysing Normative Documents in English
This tool addresses the need for automated analysis of legal and regulatory texts, but it is incremental as it combines existing components into a unified interface.
The researchers tackled the problem of analyzing normative documents like privacy policies by developing a web-based tool that integrates natural language extraction, formal modeling, and query answering, demonstrating its workflow through a running example.
Our goal is to use formal methods to analyse normative documents written in English, such as privacy policies and service-level agreements. This requires the combination of a number of different elements, including information extraction from natural language, formal languages for model representation, and an interface for property specification and verification. We have worked on a collection of components for this task: a natural language extraction tool, a suitable formalism for representing such documents, an interface for building models in this formalism, and methods for answering queries asked of a given model. In this work, each of these concerns is brought together in a web-based tool, providing a single interface for analysing normative texts in English. Through the use of a running example, we describe each component and demonstrate the workflow established by our tool.