Citation Analysis: An Approach for Facilitating the Understanding and the Analysis of Regulatory Compliance Documents

Regulated companies are required to comply with the many laws, regulations, standards, and guidelines that apply to them. The sheer volume of regulatory compliance requirements for even a small company can be considerably high, which renders the understanding of such authoritative rules a challenging task without tool support. After inspecting several regulatory documents, we noticed that they contain a significant number of citations that, if explored effectively, can reveal important information about the containing documents. In this paper, we propose a technique called citation analysis that aims at helping users to understand and analyze regulatory documents in an efficient manner. Our approach is based on the exploration of citation graphs extracted from regulatory documents. We discuss the challenges when dealing with citations. We also present an overview of a tool that can support citation analysis.