Towards Grammatical Tagging for the Legal Language of Cybersecurity
Gianpietro Castiglione Giampaolo Bella Daniele Francesco Santamaria
Legal language can be understood as the language typically used by those
engaged in the legal profession and, as such, it may come both in spoken or
written form. Recent legislation on cybersecurity obviously uses legal language
in writing, thus inheriting all its interpretative complications due to the
typical abundance of cases and sub-cases as well as to the general richness in
detail. This paper faces the challenge of the essential interpretation of the
legal language of cybersecurity, namely of the extraction of the essential
Parts of Speech (POS) from the legal documents concerning cybersecurity. The
challenge is overcome by our methodology for POS tagging of legal language. It
leverages state-of-the-art open-source tools for Natural Language Processing
(NLP) as well as manual analysis to validate the outcomes of the tools. As a
result, the methodology is automated and, arguably, general for any legal
language following minor tailoring of the preprocessing step. It is
demonstrated over the most relevant EU legislation on cybersecurity, namely on
the NIS 2 directive, producing the first, albeit essential, structured
interpretation of such a relevant document. Moreover, our findings indicate
that tools such as SpaCy and ClausIE reach their limits over the legal language
of the NIS 2.