An End-to-End Pipeline from Law Text to Logical Formulas

This paper develops a pipeline for converting natural English law texts into logical formulas via a series of structural representations. The goal is to study how law-to-logic translation can be achieved with a sequence of well-defined steps. The texts are first parsed using a formal grammar derived from light-weight text annotations designed to minimise the need for manual grammar construction. An intermediate representation, called assembly logic, is then used for logical interpretation and supports translations to different back-end logics and visualisations. The approach, while rule-based and explainable, is also robust: it can deliver useful results from day one, but allows subsequent refinements and variations. While some work is needed to extend the method to new laws, the software presented here reduces the marginal effort necessary. As a case study, we demonstrate our approach on one part of Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act. Our code is available open-source.