ProLeMAS

The project ProLeMAS was supported by a H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowship under the Grant agreement 661007.

The project ProLeMAS investigated reification to fill the gap between formalizations in deontic logic and the richness of natural language semantics. The following two main limitations of current approaches in deontic logic were identified and addressed in ProLeMAS:

1. Proposals in deontic logic are typically propositional, i.e. their basic components are whole propositions. A proposition basically refers to a whole sentence. On the other hand, natural language semantics includes a wide range of fine-grained intra-sentence linguistic phenomena: named entities, anaphora, quantifiers, etc. It is then necessary to move beyond the propositional level, i.e. to enhance the expressivity of deontic logic to formalize the meaning of the phrases constituting the sentences.
2. Few proposals in deontic logic have been implemented and tested on real legal text. Most of them are only promising methodologies, which overcome the limits of other approaches on the theoretical side. It is time to see whether the proposed formalizations are expressive enough to handle natural language semantics, i.e., to handle real norms from legislations.

In ProLeMAS, I devised a new logical framework called reified Input/Output logic [Robaldo and Sun, 2017]. Reified Input/Output logic integrates the reification-based logic proposed by prof. Jerry R. Hobbs for natural language semantics within the Input/Output logic proposed by prof. Leon van der Torre (for an introduction, cf. [Makinson and van der Torre, 2000]).

I later used reified Input/Output logic in the project DAPRECO to model norms from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).