From Statute to Control Flow: Span-Grounded Deontic Trees for Defeasible Scope Parsing
Researchers introduce NormBench, a benchmark with 2,290 legal provisions across multiple languages, and Span-Grounded Deontic Trees (SG-DT), a structured representation method designed to address Silent Scope Omission—where AI systems appear compliant but fail to apply nested exceptions correctly. Testing reveals that frontier LLMs struggle with recursive defeater chains and struggle to assemble correct logical control flow despite retrieving relevant source material.