Natural Language Processing of Rules and Regulations for Compliance in the Cloud

We discuss ongoing work on developing tools and techniques for understanding natural-language descriptions of security and privacy rules, particularly in the context of cloud computing services. In particular, we present a three-part toolkit for analyzing and processing texts, and enforcing privacy and security rules extracted from those texts. We are interested in developing efficient, accurate technologies to reduce the time spent analyzing and reasoning about new privacy laws and security rules within the enterprise. We describe the tools we have developed for semantic annotation, and also for information extraction these are specifically intended for analysis of cloud terms of service, and therefore designed to help with selfcompliance; however, the techniques involved should be generalizable to other relevant texts, esp. rules and regulations for data protection.