Preprocessing Legal Text: Policy Parsing and Isomorphic Intermediate Representation

One of the most significant challenges in achieving digital privacy is incorporating privacy policy directly in computer systems. While rule systems have long existed, translating privacy laws, regulations, policies, and contracts into processor amenable forms is slow and difficult because the legal text is scattered, run-on, and unstructured, antithetical to the lean and logical forms of computer science. We are using and developing intermediate isomorphic forms as a Rosetta Stone-like tool to accelerate the translation process and in hopes of providing support to future domain-specific Natural Language Processing technology. This report describes our experience, thoughts about how to improve the form, and discoveries about the form and logic of the legal text that will affect the successful development of a rules tool to implement real-world complex privacy policies.