A Web-Based Tool for Analysing Normative Documents in English

TL;DR

This paper presents a web-based tool that integrates natural language processing, formal modeling, and verification methods to analyze normative English documents like privacy policies.

Contribution

It introduces a unified web interface combining extraction, formal representation, and query capabilities for normative document analysis.

Findings

Successful integration of components in a single web tool

Effective extraction and formalization of normative texts

Demonstrated workflow with a practical example

Abstract

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.