Advancing a Speech Act-Based Model to Improve Future Quality of Information Security Policies Using Large Language Models

Employee compliance with Information Security Policies (ISPs) depends on communicating clear and comprehensible content. However, existing research has shown that many ISPs are of poor communicative quality. Large Language Models (LLMs) could enhance ISPs if fine-tuned on high-quality data, but to do such fine-tuning requires a conceptual model for classifying the data and evaluating the resulting text. Therefore, as a step in this direction, the aim of this article is to develop a conceptual model of ISPs using Speech Act Theory as a theoretical lens to enable assessments of the communicative quality of ISPs. We used conceptual modeling and document analysis to develop the model based on 600 ISP statements from ten British National Health Service ISPs. We used selected parts from the SEQUAL framework to evaluate the model. The evaluation pointed to potential areas for improving the model’s semantic, empirical, physical, and deontic qualities. By incorporating these improvements, the final class diagram contains 21 classes, six of which address ISP statement quality as speech acts.