From Contracts in Structured English to CL Specifications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework that translates contracts written in structured English into a formal language to automatically detect conflicts using existing tools, enhancing contract analysis accuracy.

Contribution

It presents an automated translation from structured English contracts to CL formal specifications using GF, enabling conflict detection with CLAN.

Findings

Successful translation of structured English to CL specifications

Automatic conflict detection in contracts using CLAN

Enhanced clarity of contract obligations and prohibitions

Abstract

In this paper we present a framework to analyze conflicts of contracts written in structured English. A contract that has manually been rewritten in a structured English is automatically translated into a formal language using the Grammatical Framework (GF). In particular we use the contract language CL as a target formal language for this translation. In our framework CL specifications could then be input into the tool CLAN to detect the presence of conflicts (whether there are contradictory obligations, permissions, and prohibitions. We also use GF to get a version in (restricted) English of CL formulae. We discuss the implementation of such a framework.