Lunch Talk I Quantifying how much of a law can be turned into automatically processable regulation

About the talk

We have the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Clement Guitton who will present a paper that was featured in the 3rd ACM Computer Science And Law Symposium.

Here the abstract of the paper: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already changing the way law is being applied, thereby fundamentally affecting the very core of society. While there is increasing interest in the possibility to create ma- chines that automatically process, adapt, and enforce regulation, cross-disciplinary research between AI and law has not yet deter- mined to what extent such legally intelligent machines can and should be built. This article addresses this gap by providing the first attempt to quantify the automatic encodability of regulations. To do so, we propose an algorithm that first gauges sentence complexity for machines by leveraging natural language processing (NLP) techniques for sentence simplification for open relations extraction systems; in addition, the algorithm assesses word complexity for machines by attempting to link terms to supposed functional requirements, a task that involves finding matching concepts in public ontologies and controlled vocabularies. We apply our methodology to several legislations—a few of which have already been manually transformed into machine-processable form successfully, and others for which the assumption is that they are less encodable due to the many open-textured terms that they contain. This analysis demonstrates coherence with our expectations that those deemed as featuring high ambiguity are less prone to be automatically turned into automatically processable regulation. This research is highly relevant as it provides directions to the AI as well as the legal community, and to interdisciplinary teams, with respect to enabling a nuanced discussion needed within the field on the normative challenges that the automatic processing, adaptation, and enforcement of regulation is already creating, and will trigger in the future.

About the speaker

Clement Guitton is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Computer Science (University of St. Gallen), focusing mostly on the technical/social challenges and opportunities of automatically processable regulations. Guitton holds degrees in telecommunication engineering (BSc/MSc), international affairs (Masters/PhD), and finance (MBA/FRM), and has worked for the United Nations, the Swiss government, and a large insurance company.

About the lunch talk

Everyone is welcomed to join the lunch talk. The talk will be in English and the Q&A can be in English and French.