Automated system checks documents for legal rule compliance accurately
ARCCS: An Automated Regulatory Compliance Checking System
Computation and Language
Summary
It can be hard to know if a document follows complicated legal rules because those rules are written in dense language. The authors created ARCCS, a computer program that breaks down legal text into small clear requirements and checks if documents meet them. The system uses evidence to explain its decisions and works with many types of regulations, not just one set of rules. Tests show it is very accurate in checking compliance with privacy laws and public procurement rules.
What this means in practice
- •For legal teams: Automatically verify if company documents meet complex regulatory rules and generate clear evidence-backed reports for audits.
- •For compliance officers: Use the system to detect violations in contracts or policies, speeding up regulatory risk identification and resolution.
Authors
Giorgos Filandrianos, José Menezes, Chrysoula Zerva, Alessandro Gianola
Abstract
Regulatory compliance checking - deciding whether a target document satisfies the obligations of a regulation - requires interpreting dense legal text, identifying which provisions apply, and grounding each decision in explicit evidence. We present ARCCS, an end-to-end, automated, agentic, and regulation-agnostic Legal NLP system for compliance checking. ARCCS decomposes raw regulatory text into atomic, traceable requirements and evaluates a target document against them using retrieved evidence, confidence scores, and human-interpretable justifications. This design decouples compliance assessment from any fixed regulatory template or predefined rule set, enabling the pipeline to operate over regulations of varying size and structure. We evaluate ARCCS in two complementary settings. First, in a GDPR policy-document evaluation, LLM-based judges find its decisions and justifications legally and evidentially consistent in up to 96.67% of the assessed cases. Second, on an EU public-procurement benchmark comprising more than 1,200 individual rule checks, the system attains 98.8% accuracy in violation detection. ARCCS is, to our knowledge, the first fully open-source system for end-to-end regulatory compliance checking and auditable report generation.