Annotating Regulations Using Cerno: an Application to Italian Documents

The increasing complexity of software systems and growing demand for regulations compliance require effective methods and tools to support requirements analysts activities. Internationalization of information systems due to both economics and Web based architectures call for the application of regulations written in different languages. Thus far existing approaches for extracting rights and obligations have concentrated on English documents. In this paper, we describe the results of the application of Cerno, a lightweight framework for semantic annotation, to legal documents written in Italian. In addition, we investigate critical issues for semantic annotation tools in a different cultural and environmental context. Results obtained, while preliminary, allow us to quantify the effort needed to port tools based on Cerno and give some insight on directions of future development ofa multilingual system to support semantic annotation of regulations not only in different domains, but also written in different languages.