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Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming

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Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming

#22
post #16

If you are intrigued by the idea that law can and will be represented as computer code / data, here are a few link to go deeper : * British national act as a logic program (1982): the paper that is the based of most current effort in this domain https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234805335_The_Briti... * Standford codex LSP initiative that try to standarize the format in which legal rule will be encoded https:/…

Do you think it might be possible to eventually use a Deep Learning model like GPT-3 to do the formalisation for us? It seems like a herculean task to do it by hand.

I was wandering the same thing, here in my country a lot of reforms are stoped by the constitutional tribunal, basically they are a bunch of lawyers that implement a function,

constitutional :: Constitution -> (Law | Reform) -> Boolean

I really would like to see if one can train a model like that. seeing what gpt-3 can do, it seems that we are not that far away to achieve something like an AI lawyer.

Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming

#23

This is something I've given some thought to since encountering logic programming. Could something like this be done in say, Prolog?

Logic oriented programming is really well suit for this problem.

Most complaw research happen in the logic department of universities.

- blawx.com use ergo 2 in the backend

- Kowalski ( author of iso prolog ) wrote a paper on the topic in the 80's http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/British%20N ationality%20Act.pdf

Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming

#24
post #2

It’s such a French thing to write software supporting French and English while making all the examples in README French...

Maybe that was done to prove the point that the language, unlike most other programming languages, does not have any built-in English assumptions? Also I think the examples are actually quite comprehensible even to non french speakers.

They aren’t. Also, it doesn’t seem to make sense to use only French examples in midst of English written text. I don’t think its a major problem of course and main project page contains English examples, I just found that funny.

Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming

#25
post #16

If you are intrigued by the idea that law can and will be represented as computer code / data, here are a few link to go deeper : * British national act as a logic program (1982): the paper that is the based of most current effort in this domain https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234805335_The_Briti... * Standford codex LSP initiative that try to standarize the format in which legal rule will be encoded https:/…

> If you want to work on this topic DM me :)

hnchat seems dead from a quick google :(

Deeply interested in this, thought a lot about this before, but can't work on it right now (at my startup). Do you have a blog or something? If private, pls shoot me a mail (address in bio)

Re: Catala: a programming language for socio-fiscal legislative literate programming

#29
Cool idea but also comes across as an ultra French idea. French court ruling a as far as I understand are very technocratic. You just must paragraphs applied to reach verdict.

At least here in Norway there tends to be a strong emphasis on laws being readable by the common people so regular people better know their rights.

E.g. we read consumer laws in high school and that was easy. Older laws are written in a very lawyer like Danish form. But there is continuous effort to simplify law texts.

While I do have an affinity for rigorous definitions I think this could make the law text less accessible to common people.

Also based upon what I know of the US system, it would not work as t he Us system is strongly based on past rulings rather than paragraphs. That makes a formalized approach much harder.

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