Automatic generation of amendment legislation

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come law are drafted in the Office of Parliamentary Counsel. The task of managing this legislation is mammoth and the cost of automating any part of this ...
Automatic generation of amendment legislation Timothy Arnold-Moore Multimedia Database Systems, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Abstract

primary legislation, enacted by the legislature. Statutory Rules are the secondary or subordinate legislation made by the executive under the authority of a specific Act. The major difference between primary and subordinate legislation ie the body which produces it and for current purposes most statements that apply to Acts apply equally to Statutory Rules. Principal Acts are substantive Acts which are tho subject of an amendment contained in an Amending Act (any one Act can contain both amending and substantive provisions so a single Act may fill both roles in different clrcumstances). A consolidation (or reprint) of a Principal Act is that Act as amended at a particular time. In US terma, all of the consolidations of all Acts in force would be described as the ‘Code” although this term is used differently in Westminster system governments. A very large percentage of the legislation-both primary and secondary-that is drafted is to amend existing consolidations. In Tasmania in 1992, 62 Acts were enacted of which 43 were purely amendment Acts, a further 8 made some amendments, and only 11 were purely substantive. In 1993, 112 Acts were enacted, of which 78 were purely amendment Acts, 17 made some amendments, and only 17 were purely substantive. This means that approximately 85% of legislation effects amendments. The difference between the size of the Federal Register and the rate of growth of the Code of Federal Regulations suggests that similar percentages apply to US Federal subordinate legislation. Consider the following section from a fictitious Act:

The Themis system is an integrated drafting environment for legislation which automatically generates the wording of amending legislation in the textual amendment style. Themis provides the legislative drafter with a version of the Act or Regulation to be amended on which the drafter marks the amendments directly. From these marked changes, the system generates an amending Act or Statutory Rule which reflects those changes. The various phases in this system are discussed including the knowledge representation scheme used to represent amendments, the capturing of this knowledge, the process of producing wordings Prom the representation and the control of variant wordings. 1

Introduction

Managing legislation is problem common to all governments. The total number of pages in the USA Federal Register has grown from 20,000 in 1970 to over 60,000 in each of the years from 1991 to 1995. In that time the size of the Code of Federal Regulations has nearly doubled from 70,000 to 138,000 pages. The Tasmanian government (a relatively small State of Australia) produces between 700 and 2000 pages of primary legislation and .approximately double that in subordinate legislation each year. As in most Westminster system governments, almost all of this legislation together with most of the Bills and draft Statutory Rules that do not become law are drafted in the Office of Parliamentary Counsel. The task of managing this legislation is mammoth and the cost of automating any part of this process is likely to be far outweighed by the benefits of faster and more efficient drafting. Despite calls for tools to assist the statutory drafting process [4, 5, 25, 29, 301 there are only a few systems in use almost exclusively in the category of workflow systems designed to facilitate the management of moving legislation through the process of becoming legislation rather than to automate its drafting [16]. Because of differences in nomenclature of legislation between various jurisdictions, I will adopt the nomenclature common in Westminster system governments. Acts are the

for both reasoning by rules and case-based reasoning.

Figure 1: An example section Suppose we wish to make a simple amendment to the text by replacing the word “designers” with the word “buildera”, Using the often used convention in legal circles of strike through for omission and underline for insertion, giving Figure 2: Most jurisdictions have adopted the textual style of amondment where amending legislation describes operations to convert the text of the existing consolidation into the desired consolidation [24]. The simplest version of this style of amendment is illustrated in Figure 3. The referential style of amendment formerly used in England, which requires the

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Expert

SCHEDULE

systems

8. The d&gne&uilders of expert systems shall make provision for both reasoning by rules and case-based reasoning.

I

Column 1 Provision amended

I

Figure 2: A simple amendment

Column 2 Words or symbols omitted

Column 3 Words or symbols substituted

...

...

Udesigner”

‘builder”

marked directly on the text Section 5 Section 8

Figure 3: Amendment

2 - SUBSTITUTIONS

wording of a stand-alone

section I

Principal Act be read together with the amendments [24] has generally been abandoned [25] although some examples can occasionally be seen. It is acknowledged that the full automation of consolidation cannot be contemplated without using the textual amendment style [25]. The common operation of replacing one phrase with another is typically described in au amending section (Figure 3). This same operation might also be described as a paragraph in an emending section which makes other amendments to the same target section:

,

Figure 5: Amendment

Substitutions 9. Each of the provisionsof the Principal Act specified

in Column 1 of Schedule 2 is amended by omitting the words or symbols specified in Column 2 of that Schedule and substituting the words or symbols specified in Column,3 of that Schedule. _ . Figure 6: Section effecting amendments

Section 8 amended

7. Section 8 of the Principal (a)

Act is amended:

Figure 4: Amendment

Udesigners” and substitut-

wording in a section with paragraphs

or as an entry in a table of similar amendments (see Figure 5). with a section in the body giving effect to the Schedule (see Figure 6). These wordings which are drafted directly are then applied to the consolidation, if at all, purely as a proof-reading step, to check that the desired result has been achieved. This process, despite a long established tradition, is undesirable for a number of reasons: 1. enforcing standard wordings for particular amendments requires additional checking;

in Schedule

Typicslly a consolidation is reprinted only after a number of amendment processes so keeping a repository of legislation (whether paper or electronic) up-to-date requires manually applying the amendments as described to the appropriate consolidation. While natural language processing techniques [2] (contrast the Canadian experience described in [25]) can automate the currently manual processes in items 1 and 2 (and to alesser extent item 3), they still do not address the fundamental amendment drafting problem that drafters work on the Amending legislation rather than working on the desired consolidation directly.

...

(b) by omitting ing “builders”.

wording in a table in a Schedule

Since all of the amendment wordings described above effect the same change to the Principal Act, what is really needed is a mechanism for capturing this Amending Action by marking it on the current (or other appropriate) consolidation. An ideal drafting tool would present the drafter with the appropriate consolidation of the target of the amendment (see Figure 1) and allow him or her to mark amendments on that consolidation. (see Figure 2). The systern would then automatically generate the natural language wording which matches those amendments according to the current drafting standard, choosing the appropriate style of wording depending on the context in which the amendment is being inserted.

types of

2. a separate process is required to produce the consolidation for the use of a legal researcher or the legislature; 3. an independent proof-reading process is required to ensure that the desired consolidation does result from the amendments; aud

Such a system appears to be similar to document assembly [S]. However document assembly systems are typicslly concerned with assembling complete documents from document fragments. The fragments are chosen and details within fragments inserted by running a procedural decision network [8,17,31] or a declarative rule--based reasoning pro-

4. drafters are focussed on the relatively transient wording of the amendment rather than the more permanent wording of the resulting consolidation.

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-

-

.- ----_-----

..-

.. .,

___~_

[3,6,17,9] which queries the user when the system lacks the necessary information. Both types of system are essentially tools for guiding the user through a decision-making process of what to put in a document. This paper describes a system which, rather than querying the user for information, captures that information directly from the input document. Although there is opportunity for the user to direct the ordering and structure of the generated amendment document, the system generates a complete document using default settings without further input from the user. The fragments which make up the document are generated rather than simply being assembled or having the results of user queries inserted in particular places. In Section 2 we discuss the representation of Amending Actions. Section 3 discusses the process by which the Amending Actions are captured and Section 4 addresses the production of wording from the knowledge representation scheme. We discuss the management of variant wordings in Section 5 and discuss further work in the flnsl Section 6.

amending actions is described in [2]. There are 6 basic types of amendment, omitting text, inserting text, replacing text, omitting a whole element, inserting a whole element, or replacing a whole element. Each of these frames contains details identifying the target of the amendment (and sufficient context information do generate the wording of a reference to the target), the new text or element to be inserted, and any old text to be removed (if only some text within the element is to be removed).

CUSS

2

Knowledge

representation

The Themis system manages a library of legislation which is encoded in the Structured Generalized Markup Language (SGML) [15]. SGML is an international standard for document encoding specifically designed for representing hierarchically structured data. SGML is a meta-grammar which allows the user to define a grammar (a Document Type Definition or DTD) describing the structure of a document. Particular instances of the document are marked with tags which show the structure. Each tag can hava attributes attached. Because we need to encode the inserted elements (for amending actions which insert or replace elements) within the Amending Actions, the logical choice for en encoding scheme is to use the SGML used elsewhere in the Themis system. We also have the additional bonefit of having a database engine for managing structured information encoded in SGML (the Structured Information Manager or SIM [26]) which comes with a number of tools for manipulating SGML document instances on which the Thcmis system is built. Below is an example of the SGML which would correspond to the example section in Figure 1:

for amendments

A number of alternative knowledge representation schemes have been adopted in the past for supporting natural language. Marvin Minsky describes afiame as ‘a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation, . . . Attached to each frame are several kinds of information. Some of this information is about how to use the frame.‘[23] A number of refinements of Minsky’s taxonomy of frames have been been presented [lo]. The term ‘frame’ is typically used in the natural language processing community whereas the term schema is used more prevalently in the natural language generation community 111, 13, 19, 20, 211. There seems to be little difference between some categories of frames and the schemata described in these papers [lo]. Situation frames, frames which collect lower level frames together to describe a stereotypical scene or dialogue are analogous [lo] to the scripts of Schank and others [27, 211 Fundamentally schemata, scripts and frames (whether for natural language generation or other purposes) are all templates of stereotypical situations, events or objects into which can be slotted data that distinguishes the particular instance. The word ‘frame’ tends to be applied to the simpler, lower level structures, and ‘schema’ to the higher level grouping structures, and ‘script’ seems to be used primarily where there is a temporal ordering of components within the higher level structure. In natural language generation systems where explanation is required (e.g. explaining the reasoning in a planning system, justifying a particular expression in a natural language generation system) schemata have proved to have some drawbacks [14]. Rhetoricd structure theory @ST) has addressed these drawbacks allowing more 6ne grained justification of the choices made in generation [14, 18, 211 although the combinatorial explosion of applying BST to larger texts makes it necessary to use this technique in combination with schemata anyway [14]. The plans themselves have also been used as a fundamental data structure for generation [l, 21, 22, 121, but their usefulness is also because they facilitate explanation. Amendment text is quite a limited search domain. In an environment where the drafting has been standardized, the level of choice has been reduced to a point where justification of the choices made is not really necessary (particularly in the light of Section 5). Therefore a frame or schema representation is sufficient. A simple frame representation for

CEEADNOTE>Erpertsystems Tbe designers of expert systems nhall provision for both reasoning by rules and case-based reasoning. C/SECTION>

make

Figure 7: An example section in SGML The section element contains the headnote, and tezt alements and two attributes, secno which is the number of the section, and id which is a unique identifier within that document for that section which encodes much of the context information about that element. The identifier is a list of element contexts separated by ‘I’, beginning with a two letter mnemonic for each element type (allocated to assist automatic ordering of elements) followed by the element number if any, terminated by the fixed mnemonic ‘%N”.The paragraph traditionally referred to as “section 8(l)(b),, “paragraph (b) of subsection (1) of section 8” would have an identifier of ‘GS8/Gsl/Hpb/EN”. or

The amending action shown in Figures 2, 3, 4 and 5 would be coded as in Figure 8. The action element contains the target, oldstring and newstring elements. The target element has no content but a number of attributes. These

include the identifier of the target element (SYSTEMPATH), attributes to uniquely identify the target document (ACT110 or STATRUUNOand YEAR),and attributes capturing context information which are needed in some wordings (the title of the target document, TITLE and the headnote or heading of the target context, TEEAD).

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designer builder

Figure 8: An example Amendment

tural manipulations required to identify the context of these amendments, we need to convert the document back into SGML. TO do this, an RTF to SGML converter (written in C++ with a configuration file allowing various paragraph and character styles and direct styling to be mapped onto particular SGML elements)’ is then applied to the document to produce two separate SGML representations. The strike-through and underline is used to generate two parallel trees representing the structure of the document, one before all of the changes and one after the changes have been applied. These tree structures are checked for conformance to the DTD allowing the conversion process to identity invalid amendments-amendments which would result in a document that does not conform to the drafting standards-and alert the drafter to the problem at the point where he or she saves it as a frame representation.

Act 1997”

Action frame in SGML

These two trees are then used to determine whether there is an amending action, what type it is and what information needs to be stored about it. Word processor documents are inherently flat, having no structure other than at the paragraph level and below making this extremely difficult. By generating a tree structure, a sequence of steps which traverses the tree structure around the amendment can identify the relationship between the affected element and those around it. Element omissions are simple es the only information required is the identifier of the omitted element (if the element does not have au identifier an error is flagged and the drafter must mark the amendment as a substitution of the parent element). The omission of a sequence of more than one element of the same type is treated as a single amending action. Element substitutions are almost as simple as they are simply an omission immediately followed by sn insertion of one or more elements of the same type. Textual omissions, substitutions aud insertions are complicated only by the need to identify the text within the target element. The tree is traversed upwards until an element identifier is found, which is then used as the target identifier. For omissions and substitutions, that element must be searched to identify whether any other occurences of the word or phrase to be replaced can be found in that element. If there are multiple occurences, attributes in the Amending Actions are used to identify which occurence is affected. For insertions, the context is searched in the following order:

An unordered collection of frames is insufiicient to generate a complete emending document. The Themis system collects these Amending Action frames in a structure or schema called a Change Description Document (or CDD). Amending Actions can appear within a grouping within paragraphs (Figure 4)) within various types of table in a Schedule (Figure 5)) grouped as consequential amendments in a Schedule, or in the default dedicated section (Figure 3). SGML allows us to describe the constraints on this hierarchy, and to encode particular instances of this hierarchy. The Amending Actions ( UACIIOP elements) are collected in a number of Action Groupings (UACIIONGROUP” elements) each of which has a type and can contain one or more Amending Actions. Each Action Grouping corresponds with a section or clause in the final amending Act (where the grouping produces a Schedule, a section is produced which gives effect to that Schedulesee Figure 6). These Action Groupings are in turn collected in Top Level Grouping (UACIIONIOP” elements) which determine whether the sections are grouped in parts or in the body and whether or not a definition of UPrincipal Act,, is made for the scope of the part or whole amending Act. The Themis system combines all of this information, together with information about the commencement and expiry of the amendments into a single Change Description Document or CDD. Each CDD is an SGML document containing one or more Top Level Groupings. These CDD’s are produced by marking amendments on a version of the Principal Act. The following section describes how the CDDs are derived from this version. 3

Capturing

amendments

The Themis system stores all versions of the Act in SGML. The drafter can view any Act or search the whole database using Boolean or ranking queries at any time point for which a valid version is stored on the system. This allows a drafter to check out the Principal Act to be amended as it was or will be at a given time. When the Act is checked out, the SGML instance is translated to an MS Word document conforming to a template containing macros, procedures, menus and toolbars facilitating the drafting process and assisting the drafter to produce a conformant document. The drafter can then mark the changes using these environment. The drafter then selects USave as SGML” invoking the next step. This produces a document in Rich Text Format (or RTF, a vendor-independent ASCII representation of the Word document) with altered text and whole elements in strike-through and underline styles. In order to do the complex struc-

l

look before the inserted unique in the context;

word or phrase for a word

l

ifthere is a word but it is not unique, add the preceding word to get a new phrase until there are no more words or the phrase is unique in the context;

l

look after the inserted word or phrase for a word unique in the context;

l

if there is a word but it is not unique, add the following word to get a new phrase until there are no more words or the phrase is unique in the context;

l

report an error (the user would have to perform a substitution on the parent element).

Inserting new elements requires a little more traversal of the tree to identify the correct element before or after which to ‘SIM ~1.4 and higher comes with this conversion tool but separate third party products which perform similar tasks are now available e.g. Near and Far Author, or Microsoft SGML Author.

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insert a new element. Adjacent insertions of sibling elements are treated as a single insertion. The tree is searched in the following order to find an element with an identifier: l

if the element or elements have a previous sibling check it

l

if the element check it

l

if the element or elements have no previous sibling check the previous sibling of the parent (if any, otherwise the grandparent)

l

if the element or elements have no following sibling check the following sibling of the parent (if any, otherwise the grandparent)

l

otherwise generate an error (the drafter will have to use a substitution of the parent)

or elements

4

Knowledge

representation

to amendment

wording

Because the drafting standards define quite specific and unambiguous templates for wording amendments, the CDD vastly simplifies the task of converting from a knowledge representation scheme into the particular utterance for a given amending action. Therefore the generation can be of full phrases direct from the structured representation rather than relying on a lexicon [13]. Top Level Grouping elements can produce a PART dement (derived from a template) which wraps the sections corresponding to the Action Groupings within them, If the Principal Act is defined, a template to produce the definition wording is substituting in the Act Title is applied (see Figure 9)) and the words ‘of the Principal Act’ are inserted into the requisite template (see Figures 3, 4 and 6). Otherwiso ‘of the Act Title’ will appear in its place.

have a following sibling

If any errors are encountered in this process, they are reported to the drafter and the drafter is taken in the MS Word document to where the text was found to be wanting. Only when there are no errors is the CDD generated. This CDD is essentially a flat list of Amending Actions in the order in which they appeared in the Principal Act. A major advantage of this approach is that the need for processing the amendment Acts using natural language processing techniques to ‘understand’ the amending actions [2] is removed es the system retains a record of the amending action frames (which are very similar to the frames described in [2]). These frames can be applied directly to the consolidations to produce the new consolidations and thereby keep the repository of historical consolidations up-to-date without the need for any human to interpret the amending Act. Before the linguistic forms or utterances can be generated we need to better organize the amending actions. Most ‘work on natural language generation has focussed on mapping of given compound structures on to linguistic forms. In contrast, relatively little work has been directed to the determination and organization of the context itself.,[28] Sinomin uses rules to associate and order content[28] and Themis uses a similar approach. The following rules are currently applied:

3. In thrs Act, 21

Prmupal

Act

means the Legal Ad@

Figure 9: Wording of a Principal

Act definition

Action Grouping elements first apply an approriate wrapping template. This sets either the whole section (see Figure 6) and the Schedule (and Table) wrappers (see Figure 6) or the beginning and end of the section (e.g. the headnoto and “Section 8 of the Principal Act is amended as follows:” in Figure 4). It also provides a filter for choosing Amending Action templates. If the Action Grouping specifies that amendments appear within a table of substitutions, then a single template applies. Where it calls for an amendment to appear on its own in a section, the number of templates is reduced to six. The target, which contains information about all of the elements above the amended element in the Principal Act, is used to select from the remaining available templates. Any amendment appearing within a definition must be separated into a reference to the parent of the definition, ‘is amended by’, a description of the amendment, a description of any elements in the ancestory between the target element and the definition, and then a referenca to the definition itself. Other templates exist for amendments within Schedules, Part and similar headings, tables and the default. Each template is then turned into a complete utterance by taking the target and context specification and generating the wording of the appropriate references. A separate module converts the target representation into reference wording with the required constraints (‘full’, ‘below’, ‘above’, and ‘at’ a given list of element types). This code is also used elsewhere in the Themis system to allow drafters to insert references to elements in other documents by selecting the target element in the information retrieval interface and automatically generating the wording of that reference (thus allowing the system to capture all of the information needed to later follow that reference es a hyportext link). For instance the THEA9 attribute in the TARGET element in Figure 8 is used to determine the wording in the headnote in the two sections in Figures 3 and 4. Each utterance generated from an Amending Action frame is inserted into the Amending Act combined with the wrapping wording determined by the higher level groupings to produce a complete Amending Act.

amendmentsshould generally be ordered to reflect their order in the Principal Act; amendment operations which apply to different sections or schedules should appear in separate sections; amendment operations which apply to the same section or schedule should be collected together in a single section with multiple paragraphs (Action Grouping of type ‘paragraphs”); where a single word or phrase is omitted or replaced more than 6 times in the Principal Act, those amendments should appear in a table of amendments in a Schedule (Action Grouping of type “omitOne” or ‘%eplaceone”). No manipulation of the Top Level Groupings is done automatically. The default is to have a Principal Act defined for the scope of the whole Amending Act. Since Parts are generally only used where amendments to multiple Acts are combined in a single Amending Act, the drafter has to apply some process to merge CDD’s anyway so defaults are not so relevant. The CDD with the default c-oupings applied is then returned to the Themis workflow ,)rocess from which an Amending Act can then be generated.

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6

References

Variant wordings

Because this is a commercial implementation, the drafters wanted the ability to further control the generated text manually. The Themis system provides a tool to manipulate CDD’s. This tool can be used to combine CDD’s allowing amending Acts which amend multiple Principal Acts. This requires the further grouping of amending actions into Parts, Schedules of consequential amendments, and additional types of tables. The CDD Manager allows the drafters to specify t.he commencement and expiry of particular actions or groups of actions. New groups can be created and amending actions can be reordered and moved between groups, all of which allow the produced amendment wording to be manually configured. Because of the novel nature of this work and the complex nature of legislation, there was also a requirement that the drafters be able to override the generated wording at a number of levels so that alternative wording could be inserted in the place of that generated by the system. The CDD Manager provides a mechanism for specifying overriding wordings at various levels and the wording generation module, when provided with a CDD with overriding wording, inserts the overriding wording in the amendment Act rather than generating wording from the amending actions. At the time of writing, the system has not yet been installed in the drafting office, but acceptance testing has indicated that the need for such overriding wording will be limited.

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and further work

The Themzs system demonstrates how artificial intelligence techniques can provide sophisticated tools to the drafters of legislation. In particular we have shown how amending legislation can be automatically produced. This frees drafters to consider the shape of the new consolidation and the wording of the amending Act separately. It also eliminates the need to manually apply the amendments to produce a new consolidation end thereby eliminates a number of steps in proof-reading amendment legislation. Natural language generation can be used to allow the drafter to draft the new changes directly on a consolidation of the Principal Act, and produce an amending Act with no further intervention from the drafter which conforms to the drafting standard. Having made all of the decisions about the shape of the new consolidation, the drafter can then customize the amending Act generated focussing purely on the wording of the amendments if the result is not to the drafter’s liking. Further development of Themis is underway already. We are already gathering data from the drafters on patterns where the drafters are using overriding wording or reorganizing the amending action frames to further improve the templates and the rules for organizing the frames. Having successfully applied these techniques to the legislation of Tasmania, we hope to confirm our belief that these tools will prove useful in other jurisdictions in Australia and other jurisdictions close to the English legal tradition, in the US jurisdictions which are a little further from that tradition, and also the civil jurisdictions in order to provide the drafters of legislation with the best possible tools to improve their productivity and effectiveness.

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