Reified Input/Output Logic: Combining Input/Output Logic and Reification to Represent Norms Coming from Existing Legislation

Legal scholars and practitioners are feeling increasingly overwhelmed with the expanding set of legislation and case law available these days, which is assuming more and more of an international character. Although current state-of-the-art NLP techniques provide valid solutions to help navigate legislation and retrieve information, the overall usefulness and effectiveness of the systems are limited due to their focus on terminological issues and information retrieval while disregarding the specific semantic aspects of law, in particular its logical structure in terms of constitutive and regulative rules, which allows legal reasoning.

The project ProLeMAS (PROcessing LEgal language in normative Multi-Agent Systems) was a research project supported by a European Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual fellowship aiming at making a step forward in the basic research in Legal Informatics, by devising cutting-edge computational representations of legal texts that may be used in concrete applications. The main result of the project was "Reified Input/Output logic", a novel formalism that merges the insights, while preserving the advantages, of two recent proposals in Deontic Logic and Natural Language Semantics respectively: Input/Output logic and prof. J.R. Hobbs's neo-Davidsonian logical framework.