Span-Grounded Deontic Trees

From Statute to Control Flow: Span-Grounded Deontic Trees for Defeasible Scope Parsing

Announce Type: new Abstract: Rule-following agents tasked with executing policies and regulations often fail via Silent Scope Omission (SSO): a model applies a general rule but silently drops nested exceptions or counter-exceptions, producing outputs that appear compliant yet break on important edge cases. Although such failures are often framed as an agentic-systems problem, the underlying bottleneck is statutory and policy understanding, a capability typically studied in legal NLP....