A Meta-level Annotation Language for Legal Texts

The 3rd International Conference on Logic and Argumentation

Abstract

There are many legal texts which can greatly benefit from the support of automated reasoning. Such support depends on the existence of a logical formalization of the legal text. Among the methods used for the creation of these knowledge bases, annotation tools attempt to abstract over the logical language and support non-logicians in their efforts to formalize documents. Nevertheless, legal documents use a rich language which is not easy to annotate. In this paper, an existing annotation tool is being extended in order to support the formalization of a complex example - the GDPR’s article 13. The complexity of the article prevents a direct annotation using logical and deontical operators. This is overcome by the implementation of several macros. We demonstrate the automated reasoning over the formalized article and argue that macros can be used to formalize complex legal texts.