From Legal Texts to Defeasible Deontic Logic via LLMs: A Study in Automated Semantic Analysis
This addresses the challenge of scalable legal informatics for legal professionals and researchers, though it appears incremental as it applies existing LLM techniques to a specific domain.
The researchers tackled the problem of automatically analyzing legal texts by transforming them into formal Defeasible Deontic Logic representations using large language models (LLMs), achieving promising alignment between machine-generated and expert-crafted formalizations.
We present a novel approach to the automated semantic analysis of legal texts using large language models (LLMs), targeting their transformation into formal representations in Defeasible Deontic Logic (DDL). We propose a structured pipeline that segments complex normative language into atomic snippets, extracts deontic rules, and evaluates them for syntactic and semantic coherence. Our methodology is evaluated across various LLM configurations, including prompt engineering strategies, fine-tuned models, and multi-stage pipelines, focusing on legal norms from the Australian Telecommunications Consumer Protections Code. Empirical results demonstrate promising alignment between machine-generated and expert-crafted formalizations, showing that LLMs - particularly when prompted effectively - can significantly contribute to scalable legal informatics.