This paper describes the Eunomos software, an advanced legal document and knowledge management system, based on legislative XML and ontologies. We describe the challenges of legal research in an increasingly complex, multi-level and multi-lingual world and how the Eunomos software helps users cut through the information overload to get the legal information they need in an organized and structured way and keep track of the state of the relevant law on any given topic. Using NLP tools to semi-automate the lower-skill (...) tasks makes this ambitious project a realistic commercial prospect as it helps keep costs down while at the same time allowing greater coverage. We describe the core system from workflow and technical perspectives, and discuss applications of the system for various user groups. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce the methodology and techniques of meta-argumentation to model argumentation. The methodology of meta-argumentation instantiates Dung’s abstract argumentation theory with an extended argumentation theory, and is thus based on a combination of the methodology of instantiating abstract arguments, and the methodology of extending Dung’s basic argumentation frameworks with other relations among abstract arguments. The technique of meta-argumentation applies Dung’s theory of abstract argumentation to itself, by instantiating Dung’s abstract arguments with meta-arguments using a technique called flattening. (...) We characterize the domain of instantiation using a representation technique based on soundness and completeness. Finally, we distinguish among various instantiations using the technique of specification languages. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce the methodology and techniques of metaargumentation to model argumentation. The methodology of meta-argumentation instantiates Dung's abstract argumentation theory with an extended argumentation theory, and is thus based on a combination of the methodology of instantiating abstract arguments, and the methodology of extending Dung's basic argumentation frameworks with other relations among abstract arguments. The technique of meta-argumentation applies Dung's theory of abstract argumentation to itself, by instantiating Dung's abstract arguments with meta-arguments using a technique called flattening. (...) We characterize the domain of instantiation using a representation technique based on soundness and completeness. Finally, we distinguish among various instantiations using the technique of specification languages. (shrink)

A single global authority is not sufficient to regulate heterogenous agents in multiagent systems based on distributed architectures, due to idiosyncratic local situations and to the need to regulate new issues as soon as they arise. On the one hand institutions should be structured as normative systems with a hierarchy of authorities able to cope with the dynamics of local situations, but on the other hand higher authorities should be able to delimit the autonomy of lower authorities to issue valid (...) norms. In this paper, we study the interplay of obligations and strong permissions in the context of hierarchies of authorities using input/output logic, because its explicit norm base facilitates reasoning about norm base maintenance, and it covers a variety of conditional obligations and permissions. We combine the logic with constraints, priorities and hierarchies of authorities. In this setting, we observe that Makinson and van der Torre’s notion of prohibition immunity for permissions is no longer sufficient, and we introduce a new notion of permission as exception and a new distinction between static and dynamic norms. We show how strong permissions can dynamically change an institution by adding exceptions to obligations, provide an explicit representation of what is permitted to the subjects of the normative system and allow higher level authorities to limit the power of lower level authorities to change the normative system. (shrink)

This article seeks to address the problem of the ‘resource consumption bottleneck’ of creating legal semantic technologies manually. It describes a semantic role labeling based information extraction system to extract definitions and norms from legislation and represent them as structured norms in legal ontologies. The output is intended to help make laws more accessible, understandable, and searchable in a legal document management system.

The automated identification of national implementations of European directives by text similarity techniques has shown promising preliminary results. Previous works have proposed and utilized unsupervised lexical and semantic similarity techniques based on vector space models, latent semantic analysis and topic models. However, these techniques were evaluated on a small multilingual corpus of directives and NIMs. In this paper, we utilize word and paragraph embedding models learned by shallow neural networks from a multilingual legal corpus of European directives and national legislation (...) to develop unsupervised semantic similarity systems to identify transpositions. We evaluate these models and compare their results with the previous unsupervised methods on a multilingual test corpus of 43 Directives and their corresponding NIMs. We also develop supervised machine learning models to identify transpositions and compare their performance with different feature sets. (shrink)

Every organization has to deal with operational risks, arising from the execution of a company’s primary business functions. In this paper, we describe a legal knowledge management system which helps users understand the meaning of legislative text and the relationship between norms. While much of the knowledge requires the input of legal experts, we focus in this article on NLP applications that semi-automate essential time-consuming and lower-skill tasks—classifying legal documents, identifying cross-references and legislative amendments, linking legal terms to the most (...) relevant definitions, and extracting key elements of legal provisions to facilitate clarity and advanced search options. The use of Natural Language Processing tools to semi-automate such tasks makes the proposal a realistic commercial prospect as it helps keep costs down while allowing greater coverage. (shrink)

We study access control policies based on the says operator by introducing a logical framework called Fibred Security Language (FSL) which is able to deal with features like joint responsibility between sets of principals and to identify them by means of first-order formulas. FSL is based on a multimodal logic methodology. We first discuss the main contributions from the expressiveness point of view, we give semantics for the language both for classical and intuitionistic fragment), we then prove that in order (...) to express well-known properties like ‘speaks-for’ or ‘hand-off’, defined in terms of says, we do not need second-order logic (unlike previous approaches) but a decidable fragment of first-order logic suffices. We propose a model-driven study of the says axiomatization by constraining the Kripke models in order to respect desirable security properties, we study how existing access control logics can be translated into FSL and we give completeness for the logic. (shrink)

There are two main traditions in defining a semantics for agent communication languages, based either on mental attitudes or on social commitments. These traditions share speech acts as operators with preconditions and effects, and agents playing roles like speaker and hearer, but otherwise they rely on distinct ontologies. They refer not only to either belief and intention or various notions of social commitment, but also to distinct speech acts and distinct kinds of dialogue. In this paper, we propose a common (...) ontology for both approaches based on public mental attitudes attributed to role instances. Public mental attitudes avoid the unverifiability problem of private mental states, while reusing the logics and implementations developed for FIPA compliant approaches. Moreover, a common ontology of communication primitives allows for the construction of agents which do not need separate reasoning modules to participate in dialogues with both mental attitudes and social commitments compliant agents. Moreover, a common ontology of communication primitives allows for the construction of agents participating in and combining the full range of dialogues covered by the individual approaches without having to redefine the existing protocols to cope with new dialog types. We illustrate how to extend the ontology to a semantics for agent communication and how to define mappings from existing semantics to the new one. (shrink)

The issue of representing access control requirements continues to demand significant attention. The focus of researchers has traditionally been on developing particular access control models and policy specification languages for particular applications. However, this approach has resulted in an unnecessary surfeit of models and languages. In contrast, we describe a general access control model and a logic-based specification language from which both existing and novel access control models may be derived as particular cases and from which several approaches can be (...) developed for domain-specific applications. We will argue that our general framework has a number of specific attractions and an implication of our work is to encourage a methodological shift from a study of the particulars of access control to its generalities. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the relation between beliefs and goals in agent theory. Beliefs play three roles in reasoning about goals: they play a role in the generation of unconditional desires from conditional ones, they play a role in adoption of desires as goals, and they play a role in the selection of plans to achieve goals. In this paper we consider the role of goals in reasoning about beliefs. Though we assume that goals do not play a role (...) in the belief generation problem, we argue that they play a role in the belief selection problem. We show the rationality of the use of goals in belief selection, in the sense that there are cases in which agents that take their goals into account in selecting a belief set from a set of alternatives outperform agents that do not do so. We also formally distinguish between the rational role of goals in belief selection and irrational wishful thinking. (shrink)

SOCREAL 2013 : 3rd International Workshop on Philosophy and Ethics of Social Reality 2013. Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, 25-27 October 2013. Session 2 : Imperatives and Norms.

Knowledge based privacy policies are more declarative than traditional action based ones, because they specify only what is permitted or forbidden to know, and leave the derivation of the permitted actions to a security monitor. This inference problem is already non trivial with a static privacy policy, and becomes challenging when privacy policies can change over time. We therefore introduce a dynamic modal logic that permits not only to reason about permitted and forbidden knowledge to derive the permitted actions, but (...) also to represent explicitly the declarative privacy policies together with their dynamics. The logic can be used to check both regulatory and behavioral compliance, respectively by checking that the permissions and obligations set up by the security monitor of an organization are not in conflict with the privacy policies, and by checking that these obligations are indeed enforced. (shrink)

Knowledge based privacy policies are more declarative than traditional action based ones, because they specify only what is permitted or forbidden to know, and leave the derivation of the permitted actions to a security monitor. This inference problem is already non trivial with a static privacy policy, and becomes challenging when privacy policies can change over time. We therefore introduce a dynamic modal logic that permits not only to reason about permitted and forbidden knowledge to derive the permitted actions, but (...) also to represent explicitly the declarative privacy policies together with their dynamics. The logic can be used to check both regulatory and behavioral compliance, respectively by checking that the permissions and obligations set up by the security monitor of an organization are not in conflict with the privacy policies, and by checking that these obligations are indeed enforced. (shrink)

In this paper we study AGM contraction and revision of rules using input/output logical theories. We replace propositional formulas in the AGM framework of theory change by pairs of propositional formulas, representing the rule based character of theories, and we replace the classical consequence operator Cn by an input/output logic. The results in this paper suggest that, in general, results from belief base dynamics can be transferred to rule base dynamics, but that a similar transfer of AGM theory change to (...) rule change is much more problematic. First, we generalise belief base contraction to rule base contraction, and show that two representation results of Hansson still hold for rule base contraction. Second, we show that the six so-called basic postulates of AGM contraction are consistent only for some input/output logics, but not for others. In particular, we show that the notorious recovery postulate can be satisfied only by basic output, but not by simple-minded output. Third, we show how AGM rule revision can be defined in terms of AGM rule contraction using the Levi identity. We highlight various topics for further research. (shrink)

We introduce a reciprocity criterion for coalition formation among goal-directed agents, which we call the indecomposable do-ut-des property. It refines an older reciprocity property, called the do-ut-des or give-to-get property by considering the fact that agents prefer to form coalitions whose components cannot be formed independently. A formal description of this property is provided as well as an analysis of algorithms and their complexity. We provide an algorithm to decide whether a coalition has the desired property, and we show that (...) the problem to verify whether a single coalition satisfies the property is tractable. Moreover, we provide an algorithm to search all the sub-coalitions of a given coalition satisfying the new property. Even if this problem is not computationally tractable, we show that in several cases, also the complexity of this problem may decrease considerably. (shrink)

This article describes an ontological model of norms. The basic assumption is that a substantial part of a legal system is grounded on the concept of agency. Since a legal system aims at regulating a society, then its goal can be achieved only by affecting the behaviour of the members of the society. We assume that a society is made up of agents (which can be individuals, institutions, software programs, etc.), that agents have beliefs, goals and preferences, and that they (...) commit to intentions in order to choose a line of behaviour. The role of norms, within a legal system, is to specify how and when the chosen behaviour agrees with the basic principles of the legal system. In this article, we show how a model based on plans can be the basis for the ontological representation of norms, which are expressed as constraints on the possible plans an agent may choose to guide its behaviour. Moreover, the paper describes how the proposed model can be linked to the upper level of a philosophically well-founded ontology (DOLCE); in this way, the model is set in a wider perspective, which opens the way to further developments. (shrink)

We introduce a conceptual model for reaching group decisions. Our model extends a well-known, single-agent cognitive model, the recognition-primed decision (RPD) model. The RPD model includes a recognition phase and an evaluation phase. Group extensions of the RPD model, applicable to a group of RPD agents, have been considered in the literature, however the proposed models do not formalize how distributed and possibly inconsistent information can be combined in either phase. We show how such information can be utilized by aggregating (...) it using a specific social choice method, namely judgment aggregation. Our model is applicable to hierarchical groups of agents containing at least one RPD agent. (shrink)

In this paper we address the problem of defining social roles in multi-agent systems. Social roles provide the basic structure of social institutions and organizations. We start from the properties attributed to roles both in the multi-agent systems and the Object Oriented community, and we use them in an ontological analysis of the notion of social role. We identify three main properties of social roles. First, they are definitionally dependent on the institution they belong to, i.e. the definition of a (...) role is given inside the definition of the institution. Second, they attribute powers to the agents playing them, like creating commitments for the institutions and the other roles. Third, they allow roles to play roles, in the same way as agents do. Using Input/Output logics, we propose a formalization of roles in multi-agent systems satisfying the three properties we identified. (shrink)