Khái niệm cốt lõi
Generative AI can automate statutory reasoning by treating legal documents as programs, enabling the application of software engineering techniques such as example generation, mutation testing, and property-based analysis.
Tóm tắt
The article introduces the concept of treating legal statutes and contracts as programs that can be analyzed using software engineering methods. It highlights several key ideas:
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Example Generation via Coverage and Mutation Analysis:
- Generating example scenarios to exercise specific statutory rules, similar to software test generation.
- Using mutation testing to create examples that distinguish correct rule application from incorrect ones.
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Interpreting Substitutions via Inlining:
- Addressing the challenge of cross-references and substitutions in statutes by inlining the modified versions of the rules, similar to compiler optimizations.
- This allows language models to better reason about the step-by-step application of the rules.
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Metamorphic Property-Based Testing:
- Applying the principles of property-based testing to validate generic properties of how statutes should behave, such as the monotonicity of inflation adjustments.
- Identifying potential edge cases and inconsistencies in the legal text through systematic exploration of hypothetical scenarios.
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Other Software Engineering Techniques:
- Discussing the potential application of techniques like delta debugging, change impact analysis, and automatic program repair to the domain of computational law.
The article argues that treating legal documents as programs, rather than natural language databases, unlocks new opportunities to leverage well-studied software engineering methods for the automation and analysis of statutory reasoning.