Developing Production Rule Models to Aid in Acquiring Requirements from Legal Texts

Regulatory compliance is an important consideration for requirements engineering because recent regulations impose costly penalties for noncompliance. This paper details how developing production rule models can aid in acquiring software requirements from regulatory texts. Production rules enable requirements engineers to gain valuable domain knowledge of a particular legal text by providing the ability to receive precise answers to a specific query. In particular, a production rule model facilitates communication between requirements engineers and legal domain experts, supports and augments requirements elicitation, and resolves ambiguity. Prior work in this area has failed to detail a precise methodology for translating a legal text into production rules, and considered using production rule models for aiding requirements elicitation and validation. This paper introduces our production rule modeling methodology, and demonstrates this methodology using examples from a production rule model for four sections of the U.S. Heath Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).