What to Read in a Contract? Party-Specific Summarization of Legal Obligations, Entitlements, and Prohibitions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a party-specific extractive summarization method for legal contracts, enabling tailored summaries of obligations, rights, and prohibitions to improve review efficiency and understanding.

Contribution

It presents a new dataset with expert-annotated importance comparisons and a pipeline system for generating party-specific contract summaries, addressing domain-specific importance.

Findings

The system outperforms baselines in automatic and human evaluations.

Incorporating domain-specific importance improves summarization quality.

The dataset enables training models for party-specific legal contract summarization.

Abstract

Reviewing and comprehending key obligations, entitlements, and prohibitions in legal contracts can be a tedious task due to their length and domain-specificity. Furthermore, the key rights and duties requiring review vary for each contracting party. In this work, we propose a new task of party-specific extractive summarization for legal contracts to facilitate faster reviewing and improved comprehension of rights and duties. To facilitate this, we curate a dataset comprising of party-specific pairwise importance comparisons annotated by legal experts, covering ~293K sentence pairs that include obligations, entitlements, and prohibitions extracted from lease agreements. Using this dataset, we train a pairwise importance ranker and propose a pipeline-based extractive summarization system that generates a party-specific contract summary. We establish the need for incorporating domain-specific notion of importance during summarization by comparing our system against various baselines using both automatic and human evaluation methods