This document presents an approach for automatically recommending templates for legal requirements based on natural language statements extracted from legal texts. The approach identifies the statement type and main verb to select a template with no counterpart, correlative counterpart, or implied counterpart. An evaluation on two legal corpora achieved 79.8% accuracy. Key challenges include handling nominalization, phrasal verbs, and legal terminology. Incorporating domain knowledge and human feedback improved recall and precision. The work aims to help requirements analysts elicit legal requirements focused on permissions and obligations.

1. .lusoftware verification & validation
VVS
Automated
Recommendation of Templates
for Legal Requirements
September 3rd, 2020
Amin Sleimi ∗, Marcello Ceci ∗, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh ¶∗, Lionel C. Briand ∗¶, John Dann §
∗ SnT Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
¶ School of EECS, University of Ottawa, Canada
§ Central Legislative Service (SCL), Ministry of State, Luxembourg

2. Context
2
Requirements
Analyst
Legislation
Legal
Requirements
Industry Standards
Competitive Pressure
Market Research
Requirements
Template
Stakeholder
Requirements
Technical
Requirements

3. Collaboration with the Govt. of Luxembourg
Better understanding of the law through:
• Smart search
• Question Answering systems
• Legal requirements elicitation and
elaboration
RE 2018 paper on automated extraction
of semantic legal metadata
RE 2019 paper on a query system for the
extraction of requirements-related
information
How can we use these metadata items
for legal requirements elicitation?3
Can we use these metadata items to
recommend templates of legal
requirements?
Statement
Fact
Definition
Reference
Condition
Target
Reason
Penalty
Permission
Exception
Obligation
Prohibition
Time
Auxiliary Party
Violation
Agent
Location
Constraint
Modality
Action
Situation
Artifact
Actor
SanctionResult
Statement-level
Concepts
Phrase-level
Concepts

4. Challenge
• For compliance-rule elicitation, requirement analysts are
interested in writing permissions and obligations.
• A legal text can present several types of statements as we
witnessed in our previous work
• Prior work by Breaux et al. [RE’06] establishes the importance
of balancing rights and duties for legal RE
4

5. Illustrative Example
…,an individual has a right of access to inspect… a copy of
protected health information …
• Requirement1: An individual shall be able to access to inspect
a copy of protected health information.
• Requirement2: The system shall provide access to inspect a
copy of protected health information to the individual.
5

6. Problem Description
Possible multiple viewpoints on legal statements:
• Right and obligation
• Permission and obligation
• Power statement and obligation
• Penalty statement (violation) and prohibition …
T. D. Breaux, M. W. Vail, and A. I. Antón, “Towards regulatory compliance: Extracting rights and obligations to align requirements
with regulations,” in Proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE’06), 2006, pp. 46–55.
P. Darke and G. Shanks, “Stakeholder viewpoints in requirements definition: A framework for understanding viewpoint
development approaches,” Requirements Engineering, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 88–105, 1996.
W. N. Hohfeld, “Fundamental legal conceptions as applied in judicial reasoning,” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 26, no. 8, pp. 710–770,
1917.
6

7. Research Questions
• RQ1: Can we come up with a sufficiently expressive set of
patterns for legal requirements, focusing on permissions and
obligations?
• RQ2: Can one define template-recommendation rules over
linguistic cues from legal texts?
• RQ3: If so, how accurate are the template recommendations
made automatically based on linguistic cues?
7

8. Contribution
• A list of legal requirements templates pertinent to legal RE
• A set of NLP-based rules for template recommendation
8

9. Related Work
9
Related Work
Support for ≠
stakeholders
Support for ≠
data objects
Textual
Template
Balancing
Viewpoints
Easy Approach To Requirements
Syntax ✘ ✘ ✘
Yoshida et al.'s Functional
Requirements Templates ✘ ✘
Young and Anton's Templates for
Legal Requirements ✘ ✘
Legal Requirement Specification
Language ✘ ✘ ✘
Breaux et al.'s patterns ✘
All these strands of work consider
the manual selection of a template
No Automation

10. Legal Requirements Templates
10
Proposed Template
Classification of Provisions
in Breaux et al. [RE’06]
Statement with no counterpart Straightforward Provisions
Statement with correlative counterpart Direct Provisions
Statement with implied counterpart
Delegations
Indirect Provisions*

11. Legal Requirements Templates
11
Template Category Proposed Template Example
Statement with no
counterpart
Actor <modality> Action
A covered entity shall document a
restriction in accordance with §160.530(j)
of this subchapter.
The system <modality> Action
The system shall document a restriction in
accordance with §160.530(j) of this
subchapter.
Statement with correlative
statement
Actor_1 <modality_1> Action_1 to Actor_2
The data subject shall be able to obtain
confirmation as to whether or not personal
data concerning him or her are being
processed from the controller.
Actor_2 <modality_2> Action_2 to Actor_1
The controller shall provide confirmation
as to whether or not personal data
concerning him or her are being processed
to the data subject.
Statement with implied
statement
Actor_1 <modality> Delegation_Action Actor_2
A consumer shall have the right to request
to a business that they disclose to that
consumer the sale of personal
information.
Actor_2 <modality_2> Action_2 to Actor_1 if R1
A business shall disclose the sale of
personal information to the consumer if
requested by the consumer.

12. Structure of the Proposed
Templates
• Permission with no counterpart
• Permission with correlative counterpart
• Permission with implied counterpart
12
Statement type:
Permission
Verbenet + Metax Cues

13. Approach
1. Extract the statement type of the legal provision
2. Process the main verb
3. Recommend the legal requirement template
13

14. Rules for Requirements
Templates Recommendation
14
Recommendation Rule Example
IF (“correlative verb” == False
AND statement type = type1 )
Then type1 with no counterpart
A covered entity shall document a restriction in
accordance with §160.530(j) of this subchapter.
IF (“correlative verb” == TRUE
AND “implied trigger” == False
AND statement type = type2 )
Then type2 with correlative
The data subject shall be able to obtain confirmation as to
whether or not personal data concerning him or her are
being processed from the controller.
IF (“correlative verb” == TRUE
AND “implied trigger” == TRUE
AND statement type = type2 )
Then type2 with implied
A consumer shall have the right to request to a business
that they disclose to that consumer the sale of personal
information.

15. Illustrative Example (1/2)
• The national health service may obtain all the information
relevant to the processing of a patient’s case from the health
service provider
• Main Verb: obtain
• Frame: obtain-13.5 : Agent Verb Theme [organization or
animate] {for} Asset
• Requirement: The health service provider shall communicate
all the information relevant to the processing of a patient’s
case to the national health service
15

16. Illustrative Example (2/2)
• The court may order a commission to verify the accounting
books
• Main Verb: order
• Frame: order-60 : Agent Verb Recipient Topic
• Requirement: The commission shall verify the accounting
books if the court orders to do so.
16

17. Selection of the Training Corpus
• We conducted a preliminary study on 7 legal domains (i.e.,
commerce, environment, health, labor, penal, traffic, taxation)
• The labor and health laws presented a high occurrence of
statements (20%) with correlative and implied statements in
comparison with other laws
17

18. Qualitative Study
• We reviewed the list of verbs for our dataset and validated the
presence of a corresponding trigger (we excluded 83 verbs
and 2 phrasal verbs)
• We selected a dataset (500 statements from the labor law and
another 500 for health law respectively) and we evaluated our
approach using standard accuracy metrics (i.e., precision and
recall) for class of template suggestion
18

19. Evaluation
19
Corpus
Template
Category
Ground Truth
Results
Correct (TP)
Misclassified
(FP)
Missed (FN) Precision Recall
Labor
Statement with
no counterpart
96 80 11 16 87,9% 83,3%
Statement with
correlative
statement
47 41 15 6 73,2% 87,2%
Statement with
implied
statement
13 9 1 4 90,0% 69,2%
Subtotal 156 130 27 26 82,8% 83,3%
Health
Statement with
no counterpart
107 84 14 23 85,7% 78,5%
Statement with
correlative
statement
37 32 22 5 59,3% 86,5%
Statement with
implied
statement
16 14 3 2 82,4% 87,5%
Subtotal 160 130 39 30 76,9% 81,3%
Total 316 260 66 56 79,8% 82,3%

20. Error Analysis
• Nominalization: the main action is nominalized
e.g., “the investigation shall be conducted for breaches”
• Phrasal verbs: e.g, “to take effect” is the actual main verb not
“take”
• Legal terminology: e.g, the verb “to suspend” has a
commencement meaning
• We devised heuristics to deal with the aforementioned cases.
However, the lists we constructed from the qualitative study
are still incomplete
20

21. Lessons Learned
• Incorporating human feedback identifies more accurately
suitable requirements templates (recall of 94,3% and precision of
90,6% )
• Identifying the main action in the statement is key to detect the
presence of multiple viewpoints
• Domain knowledge is crucial for the recommendation of
templates for requirements
• Handling multiple viewpoints is a paramount step for
requirements elicitation
21

22. .lusoftware verification & validation
VVS
Automated
Recommendation of Templates
for Legal Requirements
September 3rd, 2020
Amin Sleimi ∗, Marcello Ceci ∗, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh ¶∗, Lionel C. Briand ∗¶, John Dann §
∗ SnT Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
¶ School of EECS, University of Ottawa, Canada
§ Central Legislative Service (SCL), Ministry of State, Luxembourg