Detecting Logical Relation In Contract Clauses

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated method to identify logical relations between contract clauses by framing it as a Natural Language Inference task, aiming to assist in detecting contradictions and errors in legal agreements.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel approach to automatically extract logical relations between contract clauses using NLP, improving accuracy and efficiency over manual analysis.

Findings

Effective detection of logical relations between clauses

Potential to reduce contractual errors and contradictions

Improves contract analysis automation

Abstract

Contracts underlie most modern commercial transactions defining define the duties and obligations of the related parties in an agreement. Ensuring such agreements are error free is crucial for modern society and their analysis of a contract requires understanding the logical relations between clauses and identifying potential contradictions. This analysis depends on error-prone human effort to understand each contract clause. In this work, we develop an approach to automate the extraction of logical relations between clauses in a contract. We address this problem as a Natural Language Inference task to detect the entailment type between two clauses in a contract. The resulting approach should help contract authors detecting potential logical conflicts between clauses.