Austlii's Aide – Natural Language Legislative Rulebases

Abstract

Aide ('AustLII Inferencing Development Environment') provides a quasi-natural language form of knowledge representation which is reasonably close to statutory language, but at the same time represents knowledge so that it can be used by an inferencing engine using predicate calculus, not only a propositional form of representation. Problems encountered have included the need to take account of whitespace in legislation, the complexities of parsing choices, and the difficulties of determining when objects are the same or different in natural language parsing.

Aide also provide a supportive development environment for the user by parse tree differentiation to assist the user choosing the correct parsing of rules. The development environment and the user environment are both web-based, facilitating collaborative development of knowledgebases, and the integration of inferencing dialogues with legal source texts on the web.

Keywords: inferencing, artifiicial intelligence, rulebases, law, legislation, DataLex, Aide, AustLII, natural language