I've clipped in an article from today, headed:
> CBA runs AI over 230,000 words of ASIC regulation
> Australian trial follows similar work in the UK in early 2018.

[That fails to mention multiple working products c. 1990, and c.2000, incl. SoftLaw in Canberra. An email below notes a 2008 recycle.

[I'm reliably informed that Softlaw did *not* parse legislation and turn it into code. The coding depended on inspection and invention by skilled people with background in all of law, logic and the composition of logical expressions.

[But neither does the 2020 mirageware 'parse legislation and turn it into code'.

[The opening para. claims that the new software:
"**helps the bank parse** complex financial regulations and determine how best to meet them" (emphasis added).

[And even that's over-claiming.  Elsewhere it says its function is:
"to quickly **identify items in the regulation that could be reviewed and actioned** ..." (emphasis added).

[IOW, it's an at best marginal advance on the string-searching tools available since the mid-1960s, including to Softlaw 25 years ago.

[AI maintains its long track-record of re-inventing the same thing every decade or so, and seldom with much improvement (beyond running on faster processors and hence making mistakes more quickly).

[Sorry this isn't expressed in more jolly text; but Prof. Clerphell wasn't readily available when I needed him to exercise his skills.]


CBA runs AI over 230,000 words of ASIC regulation
Australian trial follows similar work in the UK in early 2018.
Ry Crozier
itNews
Mar 23 2020
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/cba-runs-ai-over-230000-words-of-asic-regulation-539687

CBA has run Australian trials of an artificial intelligence tool first piloted in the UK to help the bank parse complex financial regulations and determine how best to meet them.

The bank revealed the Australian proof-of-concept in a response to a senate inquiry into fintech and regtech last week.

"[We conducted] a recent proof of concept ... to understand how we could digitise our end-to-end regulatory change detection and management processes using an integration between Ascent and the bank’s risk management platform,” CBA said.

“The project, completed in partnership with CBA’s risk platform provider, IBM, involved over 230,000 words of regulation interpreted and converted into a series of bite-size, actionable tasks appropriate for the bank, using artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

“[The Australian Securities and Investments Commission] ASIC participated as an observer in the project."

iTnews has confirmed it is the same regtech that CBA first trialled in the UK in early 2018.

There, CBA used the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) regulation “as a test case”, running natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms over 1.5 million paragraphs of text “to quickly identify items in the regulation that could be reviewed and actioned, saving hundreds of hours of manual processing.”

A CBA spokesperson told iTnews that the bank had now run the same technology over “two pieces of ASIC legislation”.

“The first was the National Credit Consumer Protection Act, [and] the second was ASIC’s Corporations Act,” the spokesperson said.

“These Acts comprised over 230,000-plus words, which Ascent’s artificial intelligence and natural language processing capabilities were able to ingest, decompose, analyse and convert into bite-size, actionable tasks that pertain to processes, policies, systems and reporting for the bank within five-and-a-half days from start to finish.”

IBM, which supplies CBA’s governance, risk and compliance platform, were a partner to the local proof-of-concept, “co-developing an API with Ascent to have data from Ascent’s platform flow into a test instance of our governance, risk and compliance platform,” CBA said.

Earlier this month, the bank was named ‘innovator of the year’ by the Regtech Association of Australia.

“Our risk and technology teams have been working collaboratively with our regtech industry partners to test ways we can use technology to deliver better risk, compliance and customer outcomes and they can’t wait to take their ideas to the next level,” the bank’s spokesperson said.



-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: [LINK] Centrelink relies on artificial intelligence
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:21:21 +1000
From: Roger Clarke <roger.cla...@xamax.com.au>
To: Link <l...@anu.edu.au>

At 17:03 +1000 25/8/08, David Boxall wrote:
>> Centrelink is using natural language-based artificial intelligence to ensure people get the financial benefits to which they are entitled. >> The intelligence forms the backbone of a business rules and compliance software engine created by Aussie developer, Haley.

Haley's predecessor, SoftLaw was doing this right through the 1990s.

For example, a 2-minute Google found a timeline here:
http://bizrules.info/weblog/2007/11/haley_rule_bursts_into_the_bus.html

So what justifies an announcement in 2008, almost two decades after the original work?

Note that I'm not expressing doubts about the *substance* of the claims. (I'm an inveterate AI sceptic, and with very good reason. But I've never evaluated the SoftLaw work; and many years back it did seem to be making a lot more headway than most AI-based projects).


To follow David's theme then, how about:

'Media fail to use any form of intelligence in vetting media release' ?


--
Roger Clarke                            mailto:roger.cla...@xamax.com.au
T: +61 2 6288 6916   http://www.xamax.com.au  http://www.rogerclarke.com

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University
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