Raffaella Brighi

Bio: Raffaella Brighi is an academic researcher from University of Bologna. The author has contributed to research in topics: Normative & Empirical legal studies. The author has an hindex of 9, co-authored 17 publications receiving 255 citations.

Automated extraction of normative references in legal texts

Abstract: Italian Ministry of Justice, with the contributions of the researcher centres, universities and public bodies, are presently engaged in an effort to work out shared standards with which to represent legal texts. Documents standardised under uniform formats and structures make it possible to link up distinct bodies of norms, and this in turn makes it easier to find and look up norms and design tools with which to process them, as when doing legal drafting and bringing out consolidated texts. This function is enabled by marking up the different parts of a legal text: its identification data (indicating text type, text number, date of delivery, and the like), its partitions (e.g., the articles and sections that make up its layout), and the normative references it contains.

Norma-System: A Legal Document System for Managing Consolidated Acts

Abstract: The time element inherent in normative systems has become a central topic of the cultural and political debate and is of fundamental concern to legal computer science. The law is under increasing pressure to keep pace with social change: normative texts and amendments follow one another in time and get overlapped. Given this background the Norma-System project, presented in this paper, seeks to use the theoretical, legistic, and legimatic models for facilitating the task of identifying and determining what is the law in force in order to face the multiple problems from which the Italian legal system is currently suffering.

Time model for managing the dynamic of normative system

Abstract: An important need is arising in the eGovernment era: to produce updated law corpora in order to improve democracy and justice in the European new enlarged system. This article intends to propose a formal model for managing the dynamic of the norms in the time with twofold objectives: provide a set of rule for designing a legal information system able to produce in automatic way the law in force; guarantee the main principles of the theory of law such as coherence of the normative system, certness of the legislative order, knowness of the law in force.

NLP-based extraction of modificatory provisions semantics

Abstract: In this paper we illustrare a research based on NLP techniques aimed at automatically annotate modificatory provisions. We propose an approach which pairs deep syntactic parsing with rule-based shallow semantic analysis relying on a fine-grained taxonomy of modificatory provisions. The implemented system is evaluated on a large dataset hand-crafted by legal experts; the results are discussed and future directions of the research outlined.

Time model for managing the dynamic of normative system

Abstract: An important need is arising in the eGovernment era: to produce updated law corpora in order to improve democracy and justice in the European new enlarged system. This article intends to propose a formal model for managing the dynamic of the norms in the time with twofold objectives: provide a set of rule for designing a legal information system able to produce in automatic way the law in force; guarantee the main principles of the theory of law such as coherence of the normative system, certness of the legislative order, knowness of the law in force.

Addressing Legal Requirements in Requirements Engineering

Abstract: Legal texts, such as regulations and legislation, are playing an increasingly important role in requirements engineering and system development. Monitoring systems for requirements and policy compliance has been recognized in the requirements engineering community as a key area for research. Similarly, regulatory compliance is critical in systems that are governed by regulations and law, especially given that non-compliance can result in both financial and criminal penalties. Working with legal texts can be very challenging, however, because they contain numerous ambiguities, cross-references, domain-specific definitions, and acronyms, and are frequently amended via new regulations and case law. Requirements engineers and compliance auditors must be able to identify relevant regulations, extract requirements and other key concepts, and monitor compliance throughout the software lifecycle. This paper surveys research efforts over the past 50 years in handling legal texts for systems development. These efforts include the use of symbolic logic, logic programming, first-order temporal logic, deontic logic, defeasible logic, goal modeling, and semi-structured representations. This survey can aid requirements engineers and auditors to better specify, monitor, and test software systems for compliance.

Are we done with business process compliance: state of the art and challenges ahead

Abstract: Literature on business process compliance (BPC) has predominantly focused on the alignment of the regulatory rules with the design, verification and validation of business processes. Previously surveys on BPC have been conducted with specific context in mind; however, the literature on BPC management research is largely sparse and does not accumulate a detailed understanding on existing literature and related issues faced by the domain. This survey provides a holistic view of the literature on existing BPC management approaches, and categories them based on different compliance management strategies in the context of formulated research questions. A systematic literature approach is used where search terms pertaining keywords were used to identify literature related to the research questions from scholarly databases. From initially 183 papers, we selected 79 papers related to the themes of this survey published between 2000{2015. The survey results reveal that mostly compliance management approaches center around three distinct categories namely: design-time (28%), run-time (32%) and auditing (10%). Also, organisational and internal control based compliance management frameworks (21%) and hybrid approaches make (9%) of the surveyed approaches. Furthermore, open research challenges and gaps are identified and discussed with respect to the compliance problem.

LegalRuleML: XML-based rules and norms

Abstract: Legal texts are the foundational resource where to discover rules and norms that feed into different concrete (often XML-based) Web applications. Legislative documents provide general norms and specific procedural rules for eGovernment and eCommerce environments, while contracts specify the conditions of services and business rules (e.g. service level agreements for cloud computing), and judgments provide information about the legal argumentation and interpretation of norms to concrete case-law. Such legal knowledge is an important source that should be detected, properly modeled and expressively represented in order to capture all the domain particularities. This paper provides an extension of RuleML called LegalRuleML for fostering the characteristics of legal knowledge and to permit its full usage in legal reasoning and in the business rule domain. LegalRuleML encourages the effective exchange and sharing of such semantic information between legal documents, business rules, and software applications.

On rule extraction from regulations

Abstract: Rules in regulations such as found in the US Federal Code of Regulations can be expressed using conditional and deontic rules. Identifying and extracting such rules from the language of the source material would be useful for automating rulebook management and translating into an executable logic. The paper presents a linguistically-oriented, rule-based approach, which is in contrast to a machine learning approach. It outlines use cases, discusses the source materials, reviews the methodology, then provides initial results and future steps.

Eunomos, a legal document and knowledge management system for the Web to provide relevant, reliable and up-to-date information on the law

Abstract: 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.