AI-Enabled Regulatory Change Analysis of Legal Requirements

Sallam Abualhaija, Marcello Ceci, Nicolas Sannier, Domenico Bianculli, Lionel C. Briand, Dirk Zetzsche, Marco Bodellini

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Statutory law is subject to change as legislation develops over time - new regulation can be introduced, while existing regulation can be amended, or repealed. From a requirements engineering (RE) perspective, such change must be dealt with to ensure the compliance of software systems at all times. Understanding the implications of regulatory change on compliance of software requirements requires navigating hundreds of legal provisions. Analyzing instances of regulatory change entirely manually is not only time-consuming, but also risky, since missing a change may result in non-compliant software which can in turn lead to hefty fines. In this paper, we propose MURCIA, an automated approach that leverages recent language models to assist human analysts in analyzing regulatory changes. To build MURCIA, we define a taxonomy that characterizes the regulatory changes at the textual level as well as the changes in the text's meaning and legal interpretation. We evaluate MURCIA on four regulations from the financial domain. Over our evaluation set, MURCIA can identify textual changes with F1 score of 90.5%, and it can provide, according to our taxonomy, the text meaning and legal interpretation with an F1 score of 90.8% and 83.7%, respectively.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 32nd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2024
EditorsGrischa Liebel, Irit Hadar, Paola Spoletini
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages5-17
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9798350395112
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Event32nd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2024 - Reykjavik, Iceland
Duration: 24 Jun 202428 Jun 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering
ISSN (Print)1090-705X
ISSN (Electronic)2332-6441

Conference

Conference32nd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2024
Country/TerritoryIceland
CityReykjavik
Period24/06/2428/06/24

Keywords

  • ChatGPT
  • Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • Prompt Engineering
  • Regulatory Change
  • Regulatory Compliance

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