Papers by Guido Governatori
We present a novel implementation of Defeasible Deontic Logic as an Answer Set Programming meta-p... more We present a novel implementation of Defeasible Deontic Logic as an Answer Set Programming meta-program, and we evaluate the performance of the implementation against a recent set of benchmarks.
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Jul 1, 2021
Organisations have to cope with large numbers of business rules and existing regulations governin... more Organisations have to cope with large numbers of business rules and existing regulations governing the business in which they operate. Such rules are difficult to maintain due to their size and complexity, and it is increasingly challenging to ensure that each business process adheres to those rules. As such, automated extraction of business processes from rules has three clear advantages: (1) visualisation of all possible executions allowed by the rules, (2) automated execution and compliance by design, (3) identification of "inefficiencies" in the business rules. Existing approaches, however, only allow for the generation of partial traces based on input specifications and cannot handle many different input cases resulting in a full process. This paper presents a formal method to visualise and operationalise such sets of rules as a verifiable business process that is compliant by design, which allows us to analyse all possible execution paths. Additionally, we formally prove correctness of the business processes generated by our method. The approach is implemented in a tool and evaluated on both performance and correctness, showing that even for highly complex sets of rules the approach performs well and outperforms a well-known state-of-the-art approach. Evaluation on a real-life process shows the feasibility of the presented approach. * This paper extends the work presented in in the following ways: (i) it provides an updated and more efficient algorithm, (ii) it provides formal proofs of correctness of the algorithms, and (iii) it includes an extensive evaluation of the approach on both synthetic and real-life processes.
Rules and Rule Markup Languages for the Semantic Web, Aug 25, 2012
In this paper we report on the development and evaluation of a business process compliance checke... more In this paper we report on the development and evaluation of a business process compliance checker, based on the compliance-by-design methodology proposed by Governatori and Sadiq .
Springer eBooks, Dec 17, 2021
In this chapter we develop more extensively the logical framework intro-
Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Rule-based reasoning, programming, and applications
Temporalised Belief Revision in the Law
International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2009
We introduce the DR-CONTRACT architecture to represent and reason on e-Contracts. The architectur... more We introduce the DR-CONTRACT architecture to represent and reason on e-Contracts. The architecture extends the DR-device architecture by a deontic defeasible logic of violation. We motivate the choice for the logic and we show how to extend RuleML to capture the notions relevant to describe e-contracts for a monitoring perspective in Defeasible Logic.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013
arXiv (Cornell University), Mar 26, 2014
In this paper we propose an ITC (Information and Communication Technology) approach to support re... more In this paper we propose an ITC (Information and Communication Technology) approach to support regulatory compliance for business processes, and we report on the development and evaluation of a business process compliance checker called Regorous, based on the compliance-by-design methodology proposed by Governatori and Sadiq .
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, Aug 22, 2017
There is also a wide variety of such logics, expressing different intuitions about defeasible rea... more There is also a wide variety of such logics, expressing different intuitions about defeasible reasoning. However, the logics can only combine in trivial ways. This limits their usefulness in contexts where different intuitions are at play in different aspects of a problem. In particular, in some legal settings, different actors have different burdens of proof, which might be expressed as reasoning in different defeasible logics. In this paper, we introduce annotated defeasible logic as a flexible formalism permitting multiple forms of defeasibility, and establish some properties of the formalism. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.
EasyChair preprint, Aug 30, 2018
The main underlying assumption of traditional legal knowledge representation and reasoning is tha... more The main underlying assumption of traditional legal knowledge representation and reasoning is that knowledge and data are both available in main memory. However, in the era of big data, where large amounts of data are generated daily, an increasing range of scientific disciplines, as well as business and human activities, are becoming datadriven. This paper discusses new opportunities and potential applications of legal reasoning involving big data as well as the technical challenges associated with the main concepts of the big data landscape, namely volume, velocity, variety and veracity. Future research directions based on the identified challenges are also proposed.
Springer eBooks, 2013
We propose algorithms to synthesise the specifications modelling the capabilities of an agent, th... more We propose algorithms to synthesise the specifications modelling the capabilities of an agent, the environment she acts in, and the governing norms, into a process graph. This process graph corresponds to a collection of courses of action and represents all the licit alternatives the agent may choose to meet her outcomes. The starting point is a compliant situation, i.e., a situation where an agent is capable of reaching all her outcomes without violating the norms. In this case, the resulting process will be compliant by design.
Springer eBooks, 2011
We address the problem of define a modal defeasible theory able to capture intuitions as "being c... more We address the problem of define a modal defeasible theory able to capture intuitions as "being compliant" with a set of norms and a set of goals. We will treat norms and goals as modalised literals. From the definition of this new kind of logic, two main issues arises whether a theory is compliant or not: (a) how to revise a non compliant theory to obtain a new compliant one; (b) in case the theory is compliant how to create an entirely new process starting from the theory, i.e., from the fully declarative description of the specifications for a process and the norms. M. Palmirani et al (eds) RuleML2011 America, The 5th International Symposium on Rules.,
We provide a short outline of the compliance by design methodology proposed by Sadiq and Governat... more We provide a short outline of the compliance by design methodology proposed by Sadiq and Governatori to ensure compliance of business processes and its implementation in Regorous.
A formal study on legal compliance and interpretation
ABSTRACT
arXiv (Cornell University), Jun 25, 2012
There are several contexts of non-monotonic reasoning where a priority between rules is establish... more There are several contexts of non-monotonic reasoning where a priority between rules is established whose purpose is preventing conflicts. One formalism that has been widely employed for non-monotonic reasoning is the sceptical one known as Defeasible Logic. In Defeasible Logic the tool used for conflict resolution is a preference relation between rules, that establishes the priority among them. In this paper we investigate how to modify such a preference relation in a defeasible logic theory in order to change the conclusions of the theory itself. We argue that the approach we adopt is applicable to legal reasoning where users, in general, cannot change facts or rules, but can propose their preferences about the relative strength of the rules. We provide a comprehensive study of the possible combinatorial cases and we identify and analyse the cases where the revision process is successful. After this analysis, we identify three revision/update operators and study them against the AGM postulates for belief revision operators, to discover that only a part of these postulates are satisfied by the three operators.
Springer eBooks, 2018
The interest of scholars in devising automated methods to describe and analyse business processes... more The interest of scholars in devising automated methods to describe and analyse business processes has increased in the last decades due to the extreme interest of organisations in achieving their business objectives while remaining compliant with the relevant normative system. Adhering with norms and policies does not only help to avoid severe sanctions but also results in greater confidence by the consumers, and prestige for the organisation. Defining processes through the paradigm of declarative specifications is gaining momentum due to its intrinsic characteristic of being able to capture business as well as normative specifications within the same framework. We describe some of the state of the art techniques in the field of Business Process Compliance, focusing on pros and cons of such techniques, and advancing future lines of research.
Ethics and Information Technology, Sep 29, 2022
Recent years have yielded many discussions on how to endow autonomous agents with the ability to ... more Recent years have yielded many discussions on how to endow autonomous agents with the ability to make ethical decisions, and the need for explicit ethical reasoning and transparency is a persistent theme in this literature. We present a modular and transparent approach to equip autonomous agents with the ability to comply with ethical prescriptions, while still enacting pre-learned optimal behaviour. Our approach relies on a normative supervisor module, that integrates a theorem prover for defeasible deontic logic within the control loop of a reinforcement learning agent. The supervisor operates as both an event recorder and an on-the-fly compliance checker w.r.t. an external norm base. We successfully evaluated our approach with several tests using variations of the game Pac-Man, subject to a variety of "ethical" constraints.
Springer eBooks, 2021
We introduce a modular and transparent approach for augmenting the ability of reinforcement learn... more We introduce a modular and transparent approach for augmenting the ability of reinforcement learning agents to comply with a given norm base. The normative supervisor module functions as both an event recorder and real-time compliance checker w.r.t. an external norm base. We have implemented this module with a theorem prover for defeasible deontic logic, in a reinforcement learning agent that we task with playing a "vegan" version of the arcade game Pac-Man.
Artificial Intelligence and Law
This paper presents an approach for legal compliance checking in the Semantic Web which can be ef... more This paper presents an approach for legal compliance checking in the Semantic Web which can be effectively applied for applications in the Linked Open Data environment. It is based on modeling deontic norms in terms of ontology classes and ontology property restrictions. It is also shown how this approach can handle norm defeasibility. Such methodology is implemented by decidable fragments of OWL 2, while legal reasoning is carried out by available decidable reasoners. The approach is generalised by presenting patterns for modeling deontic norms and norms compliance checking.
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Papers by Guido Governatori