In brief

The candidate will study how to represent and reason formally about legislative text and investigate tools for working with or processing legal knowledge.

Background & motivation

The topic digitalization-friendly regulations is concerned with the relationship between legislative texts, the rules that the text implies, and eventually how to reason using such rules. It involves methods from programming languages, knowledge representation and logic. There is some existing work on programming legislative rules or with applications to this domain:

  • Catala: a domain-specific programming language designed for deriving correct-by-construction implementations from legislative texts.
  • s(CASP): Goal-directed execution of constraint answer set programs

Problem

The first problem to be tackled is how to represent legislative text and qrules. Then there are two key problems:

  • Transforming legislative text, for example, to improve its structure or readability. An analogy could be refactoring of programs written in some programming language.
  • Reasoning about legislative text, for example, to uncover problems or to answer questions legal questions, e.g., about permissions.

The work will combine problem analysis, theory development and implementation. Possible results of the latter kind could be:

  1. A prototype tool for legislative experts to modify and extend legislative text.
  2. A prototype tool for reason formally about legislative texts.

The candidate

The candidate should be interested in domain-modeling and (domain-specific) language design, and legislative reasoning. Knowledge of subjects such as programming languages, formal modeling or logical methods would be advantageous. In addition, the candidate should have practical programming experience.

Institutional setting

Supervision will take place in the offices of Norsk Regnesentral (NR) in Kristian Nygaards hus, the building next door to IFI. NR has ongoing work on the topic digitalization-friendly regulation, and this is a source of real-life experience for the thesis work.

Getting in touch

For more information, contact Bjarte M. Østvold (bjarte@nr.no), Audun Stolpe (auduns@nr.no) or Martin Steffen (msteffen@ifi.uio.no).