Guido Governatori

Modal Rules: Extending Defeasible Logic with Modal Operators.

In this paper we present a general methodology to extend Defeasible Logic with modal operators. We motivate the reasons for this type of extension and we argue that the extension will allow for a robust knowledge framework in different application areas.

Sending Messages in Social Networks

Since the birth of digital social networks, management research focused upon the opportunities of social media marketing. A marketing campaign has the best success when it reaches the largest number of potential customers. It is, however, difficult to forecast in a precise way the number of contacts that you can reach with such an initiative.

Practical Normative Reasoning with Defeasible Deontic Logic

We discuss some essential issues for the formal representation of norms to implement normative reasoning, and we show how to capture those requirements in a computationally oriented formalism, Defeasible Deontic Logic, and we provide the description of this logic, and we illustrate its use to model and reasoning with norms with the help of legal examples.

Combining Natural Language Processing Approaches for Rule Extraction from Legal Documents

Legal texts express conditions in natural language describing what is permitted, forbidden or mandatory in the context they regulate. Despite the numerous approaches tackling the problem of moving from a natural language legal text to the respective set of machine-readable conditions, results are still unsatisfiable and it remains a major open challenge. In this paper, we propose a preliminary approach which combines different Natural Language Processing techniques towards the extraction of rules from legal documents. More precisely, we combine the linguistic information provided by WordNet together with a syntax-based extraction of rules from legal texts, and a logic-based extraction of dependencies between chunks of such texts. Such a combined approach leads to a powerful solution towards the extraction of machine-readable rules from legal documents. We evaluate the proposed approach over the Australian “Telecommunications consumer protections code”.

A Deontic Argumentation Framework Based on Deontic Defeasible Logic

Deontic Defeasible Logic (DDL) is a simple and computationally efficient approach for the representation of normative reasoning. Traditionally defeasible logics are defined proof theoretically based on the proof conditions for the logic. In this paper we present an argumentation system that corresponds to a variant of DDL. The resulting machinery is able to grasp in a natural way intuitions behind deontic reasoning with conditional norms featuring obligations, prohibitions, and (strong or weak) permissions.

Declarative Approaches for Compliance by Design

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.

Information and friend segregation for online social networks: a user study

Online social networks (OSNs) captured the attention of the masses by offering attractive means of sharing personal information and developing social relationships. People expose personal information about their lives on OSNs. This may result in undesirable consequences of users’ personal information leakage to an unwanted audience and raises privacy concerns. The issue of privacy has received a significant attention in both the research literature and the mainstream media. In this paper, we present results of an empirical study that measure users’ attitude towards interpersonal privacy concerns in OSNs. The results demonstrated a serious mismatch between privacy concerns of users and their information sharing behavior. In addition, it indicated that strangers are part of user social circles, this makes privacy protection more complicated, and introduce an insider threat, whereas all existing privacy tools allow users to manage the outsider threat. Information and friend segregation strategies are suggested on the basis of user information disclosure and interaction pattern. We conclude that sensitivity of information and frequency of interaction, both, play a vital role in information and friend segregation.