Lanchester R&DTactical Exploration Lab
Research Archive // Intelligence
Phase 01 WhitepaperRef: MAR-204-X

Regulatory Extraction:
Zero-Shot Parsing of Maritime & Transport Law

Maritime Law Boundaries

01 // Project Thesis

The Problem of Jurisdictional Volatility

International maritime and transport regulations are updated continuously across hundreds of overlapping jurisdictions. For logistics firms and autonomous vessel operators, manual interpretation of these shifts creates significant lag in operational compliance, leading to legal friction and increased insurance risk.

Hypothesis

"Zero-shot LLM extraction can transform unstructured regulatory updates into machine-readable operational directives without the need for jurisdiction-specific fine-tuning."

Source Regulation
"In accordance with IMO Resolution MSC.428(98), shipowners must ensure that cyber risks are appropriately addressed in existing safety management systems..."
Extraction Layer
Structured Schema
{
  "authority": "IMO",
  "directive": "Cyber_Risk_Mgt",
  "compliance_target": "SMS",
  "effective_date": "2021-01-01"
}

02 // Research Methodology

Our laboratory processed a diverse corpus of 14,000 regulatory nodes to test the limits of cross-jurisdictional zero-shot interpretation.

Dataset Collection

Regulatory feeds from IMO (International Maritime Org), EU Transport Law bulletins, and bilateral maritime treaties.

Cross-Language Parsing

Evaluation of extraction accuracy across EN (English), FR (French), DE (German), and ES (Spanish) texts.

Schema Enforcement

Validation of extraction outputs against strict Operational Directive schemas to ensure machine-readability.

Benchmark Comparison

Accuracy and latency comparison vs. legacy rule-based NLP and human legal analyst teams.

Unstructured LawLLMJSON Directive
FIG_02: Extraction Pipeline // Logic Flow

03 // Findings

Test CategoryZero-Shot AccuracyHuman Bench
Directive Extraction98.2%99.1%
Jurisdictional Mapping94.7%96.4%
Date/Compliance Deadlines99.4%98.8%

While structural extraction accuracy reached 98%, primary failure modes occurred in jurisdictional override clauses where a regional law (e.g., individual EU member state) contradicted an international treaty within the same document snippet.

The models demonstrated exceptional performance in amendment detection—accurately identifying specific line shifts in regulatory updates from previous versions without requiring historical context in the prompt.

04 // Strategic Impact

Shipping Logistics

Real-time routing adjustments based on localized maritime compliance shifts.

Autonomous Vessels

Dynamic boundary-law integration for machine-led navigation units.

Aviation Compliance

Accelerated airspace access through automated flight-path regulatory review.

Risk Dashboards

Global regulatory heatmaps showing volatility patterns in trade corridors.

// Lab Investigation Status: Active // Technical Partnership Invited

Request Sample Data
© 2025 Lanchester R&D LaboratorySecurity Level: Alpha-BlueDocument L-RD_REG_0X