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... 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.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Information Systems, Computer Science, Natural Language Processing, Requirements Engineering, RSS, and 11 moreComputer Software, Case Study, Natural language, Ambiguity, Requirements Analysis, Software Requirement Specification, Wer, Natural Language Processing(NLP), Software Requirements Specification, Sentence, and linguistic tools
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
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... 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.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Computer Science, Information Retrieval, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, and 15 moreInformation Extraction, Reverse Engineering, Annotation, Document Analysis, Case Study, Knowledge Engineering, Information Sources, Conceptual Schema, Experimental Evaluation, Legacy software, Large Scale, Internet, Conceptual Schemas, Automatic Annotation, and Practical Aspects
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
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... 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 ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
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... 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 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 an experiment designed to assess the extent to which a Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool improves the quality of conceptual models, specifically objectoriented 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 fro...
Research Interests:
Text ambiguity is one of the most interesting phenomenon in human communication and a difficult problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Identification of text ambiguities is an important task for evaluating the quality of text and... more
Text ambiguity is one of the most interesting phenomenon in human communication and a difficult problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Identification of text ambiguities is an important task for evaluating the quality of text and uncovering its vulnerable points. There exist several types of ambiguity. In the present work we review and compare different approaches to ambiguity identification task. We also propose our own approach to this problem. Moreover, we present the prototype of a tool for ambiguity identification and measurement in natural language text. The tool is intended to support the process of writing high quality documents.
Research Interests:
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... 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.
Research Interests:
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... 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 and constrain existing ones. The analysis of a software system and the degree to which it complies with applicable laws can be greatly... 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...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The paper presents an overview of the user generated content service that the ASSETS Best Practice Network is designing, implementing and evaluating with the user for Europeana, the European digital library. The service will allow... more
The paper presents an overview of the user generated content service that the ASSETS Best Practice Network is designing, implementing and evaluating with the user for Europeana, the European digital library. The service will allow Europeana users to contribute to the ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Information Systems, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Engineering, Natural Language Processing, and 14 moreRequirements Engineering, IT Management, Semantic Web, Secure Software Development, Computer Software, BPM, Case Study, Natural language, Ambiguity, IT Security, Software Requirement Specification, Natural Language Processing(NLP), IT Compliance, and linguistic tools
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The paper presents an overview of the user generated content service that the ASSETS Best Practice Network is designing, implementing and evaluating with the user for Europeana, the European digital library. The service will allow... more
The paper presents an overview of the user generated content service that the ASSETS Best Practice Network is designing, implementing and evaluating with the user for Europeana, the European digital library. The service will allow Europeana users to contribute to the ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Evaluation of the communicative efficacy of a website is important in the context of an organization communication strategy. To address this issue, we propose a systematic method and a tool that supports it. The tool is based on a... more
Evaluation of the communicative efficacy of a website is important in the context of an organization communication strategy. To address this issue, we propose a systematic method and a tool that supports it. The tool is based on a general-purpose semantic annotation framework. The application and feasibility of the method are introduced through a case study where it was used to compare the communicative efficacy of a set of tourist destination websites.