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An empirical study of natural language parsing of privacy policy rules using the SPARCLE policy workbench

Published: 12 July 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Today organizations do not have good ways of linking their written privacy policies with the implementation of those policies. To assist organizations in addressing this issue, our human-centered research has focused on understanding organizational privacy management needs, and, based on those needs, creating a usable and effective policy workbench called SPARCLE. SPARCLE will enable organizational users to enter policies in natural language, parse the policies to identify policy elements and then generate a machine readable (XML) version of the policy. In the future, SPARCLE will then enable mapping of policies to the organization's configuration and provide audit and compliance tools to ensure that the policy implementation operates as intended. In this paper, we present the strategies employed in the design and implementation of the natural language parsing capabilities that are part of the functional version of the SPARCLE authoring utility. We have created a set of grammars which execute on a shallow parser that are designed to identify the rule elements in privacy policy rules. We present empirical usability evaluation data from target organizational users of the SPARCLE system and highlight the parsing accuracy of the system with the organizations' privacy policies. The successful implementation of the parsing capabilities is an important step towards our goal of providing a usable and effective method for organizations to link the natural language version of privacy policies to their implementation, and subsequent verification through compliance auditing of the enforcement logs.

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  1. An empirical study of natural language parsing of privacy policy rules using the SPARCLE policy workbench

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      SOUPS '06: Proceedings of the second symposium on Usable privacy and security
      July 2006
      168 pages
      ISBN:1595934480
      DOI:10.1145/1143120
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 12 July 2006

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      Author Tags

      1. design
      2. policy
      3. privacy
      4. security
      5. social and legal issues
      6. usability

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      • (2023)Effective Collaboration in the Management of Access Control Policies: A Survey of ToolsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.324286311(13929-13947)Online publication date: 2023
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