Daily Arxiv

This is a page that curates AI-related papers published worldwide.
All content here is summarized using Google Gemini and operated on a non-profit basis.
Copyright for each paper belongs to the authors and their institutions; please make sure to credit the source when sharing.

From Legal Texts to Defeasible Deontic Logic via LLMs: A Study in Automated Semantic Analysis

Created by
  • Haebom

Author

Elias Horner, Cristinel Mateis, Guido Governatori, Agata Ciabattoni

Outline

This paper presents a novel approach for automated semantic analysis of legal documents using large-scale language models (LLMs). This approach aims to transform legal text into a formal representation of rebuttable deontic logic (DDL). We propose a structured pipeline that decomposes complex normative language into atomic fragments, extracts deontic rules, and assesses syntactic and semantic consistency. We evaluate the methodology against various LLM configurations, including prompt engineering strategies, fine-tuned models, and multi-stage pipelines, focusing on legal norms from the Australian Communications Consumer Protection Act. Experimental results demonstrate promising agreement between machine-generated and expert-written formalizations, demonstrating that effectively prompted LLMs can significantly contribute to scalable legal informatics.

Takeaways, Limitations

Takeaways:
Presenting the possibility of automated semantic analysis and formalization of legal documents using LLM.
Identifying the potential for improving LLM performance through effective prompt engineering and fine-tuning.
Contributions to scalable legal informatics.
Demonstrating the practicality of analyzing legal text using a formal logic system such as DDL.
Limitations:
The evaluation dataset is limited to the scope of Australian communications consumer protection law, requiring further research on generalizability.
The performance of LLM is highly dependent on prompt engineering and model construction.
Performance limitations for processing complex and ambiguous legal text.
Additional verification of the accuracy and reliability of conversion to DDL is required.
👍