Detection of Conflicts, Contradictions and Inconsistencies in Regulatory Documents: A Literature Review
Gerrit Schumann, Jorge Marx Gómex · 2024
Companies create regulatory documents, such as policies, standards, and guidelines, to define their processes and structures. These documents are used by employees to ensure the proper execution of processes and by auditors to check the actual compliance with the respective requirements. Especially in large organizations, these documents are constantly updated, which can lead to conflicts, inconsistencies, or contradictions between these documents, which in turn can contribute to errors and delays, the compromise of assets, non-compliance or the facilitation of fraud. Given the large number of different regulatory documents as well as the different interpretations of conflicts and the technical approaches to detect them, this paper aims to provide an overview of previous research in this field. To this end, we conducted a structured literature review based on 46 publications to analyze various aspects, such as the types, domains, language, and structure of the analyzed regulatory documents as well as the types of conflicts and the technical approaches to detect them. In this way, we have shown the current state-of-the-art, identified potential challenges, and highlighted possible research directions.