Controlling Ambiguities in Legislative Language

Abstract

Legislative language exhibits some characteristics typical of languages of administration that are particularly prone to eliciting ambiguities. However, ambiguity is generally undesirable in legislative texts and can pose problems for the interpretation and application of codified law. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods of controlled natural languages can be applied to prevent ambiguities in legislative texts. We investigate what types of ambiguities are frequent in legislative language and therefore important to control, and we examine which ambiguities are already controlled by existing drafting guidelines. For those not covered by the guidelines, we propose additional control mechanisms. Wherever possible, the devised mechanisms reflect existing conventions and frequency distributions and exploit domain-specific means to make ambiguities explicit. Abstract. Legislative language exhibits some characteristics typical of languages of administration that are particularly prone to eliciting ambiguities. However, ambiguity is generally undesirable in legislative texts and can pose problems for the interpretation and application of codified law. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods of controlled natural languages can be applied to prevent ambiguities in legislative texts. We investigate what types of ambiguities are frequent in legislative language and therefore important to control, and we examine which ambiguities are already controlled by existing drafting guidelines. For those not covered by the guidelines, we propose additional control mechanisms. Wherever possible, the devised mechanisms reflect existing conventions and frequency distributions and exploit domain-specific means to make ambiguities explicit.

A survey of challenges for runtime verification from advanced application domains (beyond software)

“…The use of controlled natural languages (CNL) [219] has been proposed in different works in order to facilitate bridging the gap between the natural language description of the original document and a more formal representation in the form of a formal language [14,89,91,238]. In a legal specification setting, there is initial work in this direction, but we are still far from reaching this goal [86,90,91].…”

Legislative Drafting Guidelines: How Different Are They from Controlled Language Rules for Technical Writing?

“…Table 1 gives an overview of the distribution of sentence-level rules in the five rule sets analysed and lists the linguistic phenomena they control. 6 Four sub-categories of sentence-level rules have been identified, namely rules aimed at controlling (i) ambiguity, (ii) complexity, (iii) modality and tense and (iv) information structure. The remainder of this section will discuss the main characteristics that the present comparison has revealed for these four rule classes.…”

“…While all of the analysed legislative drafting guidelines name the avoidance of ambiguity as one of their aims, they provide only few actual drafting rules to address the problem. This finding is somewhat surprising in light of the fact that ambiguity in laws has received considerable attention in the literature [6,25,28]. The German guidelines contain general statements urging for the avoidance of attachment ambiguity, anaphoric ambiguity and relational ambiguity but offer no specific instructions.…”