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Towards Grammatical Tagging for the Legal Language of Cybersecurity

Authors:

Gianpietro Castiglione,

Giampaolo Bella,

Daniele Francesco SantamariaAuthors Info & Claims

ARES '23: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security

Article No.: 82, Pages 1 - 9

https://doi.org/10.1145/3600160.3605069

Published: 29 August 2023 Publication History

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Abstract

Legal language can be understood as the language typically used by those engaged in the legal profession and, as such, it may come both in spoken or written form. Recent legislation on cybersecurity obviously uses legal language in writing, thus inheriting all its interpretative complications due to the typical abundance of cases and sub-cases as well as to the general richness in detail. This paper faces the challenge of the essential interpretation of the legal language of cybersecurity, namely of the extraction of the essential Parts of Speech (POS) from the legal documents concerning cybersecurity.

The challenge is overcome by our methodology for POS tagging of legal language. It leverages state-of-the-art open-source tools for Natural Language Processing (NLP) as well as manual analysis to validate the outcomes of the tools. As a result, the methodology is automated and, arguably, general for any legal language following minor tailoring of the preprocessing step. It is demonstrated over the most relevant EU legislation on cybersecurity, namely on the NIS 2 directive, producing the first, albeit essential, structured interpretation of such a relevant document. Moreover, our findings indicate that tools such as SpaCy and ClausIE reach their limits over the legal language of the NIS 2.

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Cited By

Castiglione GBella GSantamaria D(2025)SecOntoComputers and Security10.1016/j.cose.2024.104150148:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.cose.2024.104150
Zhang ZXiao N(2025)An effective anonymous authentication and key negotiation protocol for legal system networkAlexandria Engineering Journal10.1016/j.aej.2024.12.032115(434-442)Online publication date: Mar-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aej.2024.12.032
Bella GCantone DCastiglione GNicolosi Asmundo MSantamaria D(2024)A behaviouristic semantic approach to blockchain-based e-commerceSemantic Web10.3233/SW-24354315:5(1863-1914)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-243543

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cover image ACM Other conferences

ARES '23: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security

August 2023

1440 pages

ISBN:9798400707728

DOI:10.1145/3600160

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 29 August 2023

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ARES 2023

ARES 2023: The 18th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security

August 29 - September 1, 2023

Benevento, Italy

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Cited By

Castiglione GBella GSantamaria D(2025)SecOntoComputers and Security10.1016/j.cose.2024.104150148:COnline publication date: 1-Jan-2025
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.cose.2024.104150
Zhang ZXiao N(2025)An effective anonymous authentication and key negotiation protocol for legal system networkAlexandria Engineering Journal10.1016/j.aej.2024.12.032115(434-442)Online publication date: Mar-2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aej.2024.12.032
Bella GCantone DCastiglione GNicolosi Asmundo MSantamaria D(2024)A behaviouristic semantic approach to blockchain-based e-commerceSemantic Web10.3233/SW-24354315:5(1863-1914)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-243543

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