Last week the Seventh International Workshop on Controlled Natural Language took place in Amsterdam. The event concluded with a keynote speech from Robert Kowalski (Professor Emeritus at ICL) in which he discussed some of his recent work developing Logical English: a high-level controlled natural language (CNL) that can be understood by people with no training in computer science, logic, or mathematics. As well as being easily interpretable, Logical English was designed to be machine-executable from the outset. By empowering non-technical people to scrutinise and develop rules for use with AI legal-reasoning systems, Logical English should broaden the applications of rules-based AI and drive its wider adoption. Due to its concise and unambiguous nature, it is also believed that Logical English will facilitate:

  • the drafting of clear and robust future legislation

  • broader education about the fundamentals of logic

The slides from Prof. Kowalski’s keynote presentation are available here, more information about Logical English can be found on his webpage.

In his keynote presentation, Prof. Kowalski’s acknowledged AORA’s support of his recent work (especially in the domain of tax legislation), and included a mention of AORA’s Nationality Determiner as a ground-breaking example of a comprehensive rules-based AI system in commercial use. AORA is pleased to announce that we have been working closely with Prof. Kowalski, together with the computational logic experts from Logical Contracts: Miguel Calejo (past: co-founder of Coherent, University of Minho) and Jacinto Dávila Quintero (past: Universidad de los Andes), supporting their work designing Logical English and constructing the software tools to support it. Australian tax expert and entrepreneur, Andrew Noble (and his company LodgeIt), has also contributed extensively to the project. Concurrent with this ongoing research, AORA's platform is being augmented with the capability to support rules defined in Logical English, as we believe the adoption of an open, easily-interpretable CNL is integral to the future of the ‘law as code’ vision. In doing so, AORA cements its position as a forerunner in the application of computational law and expands its capability to address the burgeoning regulatory market in future.

Further details of our ongoing collaboration will be made publicly available at a later date.