Comparing and analyzing definitions in multi-jurisdictions

Regulatory definitions establish the scope and boundary for legal statements and provide software designers with means to assess the coverage of their designs under the law. However, the number of phrases that serve to define this boundary in a legal statement are usually large and often a simple legal statement contains or is affected by up to 10 definition-related phrases. In addition, software designers may need to design their software to operate under multiple jurisdictions, which may not use the same terminology to express conditions. Thus, it is necessary for designers to keep track of definitions in one or more regulations and to compare these definitions across jurisdictions. In this paper we report a study to develop a method to analyze and compare natural language definitions across legal texts and how to analyze the legal statements with respect to definitions. Our method helps reduce the number of comparison between definitions across multiple jurisdictions as well as allows software designers keep track of several inter-related definitions in a systematic way.