Towards Translating Natural Language Normative Text into a Digital Twin of Administrative Law

Florian Schnitzhofer; Christoph Georg Schütz

Towards Translating Natural Language Normative Text into a Digital Twin of Administrative Law

Florian Schnitzhofer^*
, Christoph Georg Schütz

^*Corresponding author for this work

Institute of Business Informatics - Data & Knowledge Engineering

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference proceedings › peer-review

Abstract

Automating public-sector decision-making promises efficiency gains in administration. This short paper proposes a research agenda for translating natural-language normative text into a Digital Twin of Administrative Law (DTAL), which we envision as a layered, executable representation of statutes that preserves traceability to the authoritative legal text while enabling accountable automation of decision-making in the public sector. To obtain a DTAL from normative text, a stepwise translation pipeline must be followed, which we demonstrated on the Upper Austrian Tourism Contribution Levy Act. The resulting DTAL yields deterministic and explainable outcomes. In this short paper, we outline open questions on standardizing legal ontologies, integrating LLMs as assistant tools, and embedding DTALs into public-sector engineering practices to realize transparent auditable automation of decision-making aligned with the rule of law.

Keywords: Legal ontologies, law as code, digital twin of legislation, automated decision-making, administrative law

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Proceedings of the International Workshop on Translating Natural Legal Language into Formal Representation (NLL2FR 2025), co-located with the 38th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2025), Turin, Italy, December 9, 2025
Editors	Ken Satoh, Georg Borges, Hannes Westermann, May Myo Zin
Pages	157-163
Number of pages	7
Publication status	Published - Dec 2025

Fields of science

102030 Semantic technologies
502050 Business informatics
102010 Database systems
102035 Data science
503008 E-learning
502058 Digital transformation
509026 Digitalisation research
102033 Data mining
102 Computer Sciences
102027 Web engineering
102028 Knowledge engineering
102016 IT security
102015 Information systems
102025 Distributed systems

JKU Focus areas

Digital Transformation

Access to Document

https://jurisinformaticscenter.github.io/NLL2FR2025/NLL2FR2025proceedings.pdf

Cite this

Schnitzhofer, F., & Schütz, C. G. (2025). Towards Translating Natural Language Normative Text into a Digital Twin of Administrative Law. In K. Satoh, G. Borges, H. Westermann, & M. M. Zin (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Workshop on Translating Natural Legal Language into Formal Representation (NLL2FR 2025), co-located with the 38th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2025), Turin, Italy, December 9, 2025 (pp. 157-163) https://jurisinformaticscenter.github.io/NLL2FR2025/NLL2FR2025proceedings.pdf

Schnitzhofer, Florian ; Schütz, Christoph Georg. / Towards Translating Natural Language Normative Text into a Digital Twin of Administrative Law. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Translating Natural Legal Language into Formal Representation (NLL2FR 2025), co-located with the 38th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2025), Turin, Italy, December 9, 2025. editor / Ken Satoh ; Georg Borges ; Hannes Westermann ; May Myo Zin. 2025. pp. 157-163

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abstract = "Automating public-sector decision-making promises efficiency gains in administration. This short paper proposes a research agenda for translating natural-language normative text into a Digital Twin of Administrative Law (DTAL), which we envision as a layered, executable representation of statutes that preserves traceability to the authoritative legal text while enabling accountable automation of decision-making in the public sector. To obtain a DTAL from normative text, a stepwise translation pipeline must be followed, which we demonstrated on the Upper Austrian Tourism Contribution Levy Act. The resulting DTAL yields deterministic and explainable outcomes. In this short paper, we outline open questions on standardizing legal ontologies, integrating LLMs as assistant tools, and embedding DTALs into public-sector engineering practices to realize transparent auditable automation of decision-making aligned with the rule of law. Keywords: Legal ontologies, law as code, digital twin of legislation, automated decision-making, administrative law",

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Schnitzhofer, F & Schütz, CG 2025, Towards Translating Natural Language Normative Text into a Digital Twin of Administrative Law. in K Satoh, G Borges, H Westermann & MM Zin (eds), Proceedings of the International Workshop on Translating Natural Legal Language into Formal Representation (NLL2FR 2025), co-located with the 38th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2025), Turin, Italy, December 9, 2025. pp. 157-163. <https://jurisinformaticscenter.github.io/NLL2FR2025/NLL2FR2025proceedings.pdf>

Towards Translating Natural Language Normative Text into a Digital Twin of Administrative Law. / Schnitzhofer, Florian; Schütz, Christoph Georg.
Proceedings of the International Workshop on Translating Natural Legal Language into Formal Representation (NLL2FR 2025), co-located with the 38th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2025), Turin, Italy, December 9, 2025. ed. / Ken Satoh; Georg Borges; Hannes Westermann; May Myo Zin. 2025. p. 157-163.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference proceedings › peer-review

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Schnitzhofer F, Schütz CG. Towards Translating Natural Language Normative Text into a Digital Twin of Administrative Law. In Satoh K, Borges G, Westermann H, Zin MM, editors, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Translating Natural Legal Language into Formal Representation (NLL2FR 2025), co-located with the 38th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2025), Turin, Italy, December 9, 2025. 2025. p. 157-163