The Centre for Computational Law has merged with the Centre for AI and Data Governance to form the Centre for Digital Law. The new Centre examines the transformative impact of digital technologies on legal systems, government, society, and economy. Our research, including the Research Programme on Computational Law, continue under its ambit. Our current website will remain operational in this transitional period but we strongly encourage you to visit our new website at cdl.smu.edu.sg and explore the updated features and content. If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact our support team at cclawadmin@smu.edu.sg.
Towards CNL-based Verbalization of Computational Contracts
At CCLAW, our work aims at computerizing legal reasoning in a manner that is both formally precise and intuitively accessible to legal experts. The cornerstone is a domain specific language (DSL) for the legal domain, called L4, which can be converted to natural language but is also the basis for formal verification procedures.
L4's applied focus places it within the "Rules as Code" movement (e.g. OpenFisca, Catala) that itself draws on early computational law thinking. But rather than focusing on encoding laws into existing programming languages, we devise an external DSL designed for legal specification. From this specification, we generate a range of output formats. Key augmentations include IDE support, formal verification engines, transpilation to operational rule engines, and natural language generation (NLG). The latter is done via a controlled natural language (CNL) implemented in Grammatical Framework (GF), and is the focus of this paper.
