Extracting Formal Models from Normative Texts

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semi-automatic method to convert normative texts, which contain obligations, permissions, and prohibitions, into formal C-O Diagrams for analysis of causality and timing properties.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach combining dependency parsing and heuristics to extract formal models from normative texts, facilitating their analysis.

Findings

Effective extraction of normative components using dependency trees

Conversion of extracted data into C-O Diagrams for formal analysis

Demonstrated semi-automatic process improves modeling efficiency

Abstract

Normative texts are documents based on the deontic notions of obligation, permission, and prohibition. Our goal is to model such texts using the C-O Diagram formalism, making them amenable to formal analysis, in particular verifying that a text satisfies properties concerning causality of actions and timing constraints. We present an experimental, semi-automatic aid to bridge the gap between a normative text and its formal representation. Our approach uses dependency trees combined with our own rules and heuristics for extracting the relevant components. The resulting tabular data can then be converted into a C-O Diagram.