Logical English meets legal English for swaps and derivatives

Abstract

In this paper, we present an informal introduction to Logical English (LE) and illustrate its use to standardise the legal wording of the Automatic Early Termination (AET) clauses of International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) Agreements. LE can be viewed both as an alternative to conventional legal English for expressing legal documents, and as an alternative to conventional computer languages for automating legal documents. LE is a controlled natural language (CNL), which is designed both to be computer-executable and to be readable by English speakers without special training. The basic form of LE is syntactic sugar for logic programs, in which all sentences have the same standard form, either as rules of the form conclusion if conditions or as unconditional sentences of the form conclusion. However, LE extends normal logic programming by introducing features that are present in other computer languages and other logics. These features include typed variables signalled by common nouns, and existentially quantified variables in the conclusions of sentences signalled by indefinite articles. Although LE translates naturally into a logic programming language such as Prolog or ASP, it can also serve as a neutral standard, which can be compiled into other lower-level computer languages.