Classification of Contract-Amendment Relationships

In Contract Life-cycle Management (CLM), managing and tracking the master agreements and their associated amendments is essential, in order to be kept informed with different due dates and obligations. An automatic solution can facilitate the daily jobs and improve the efficiency of legal practitioners. In this paper, we propose an approach based on machine learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to detect the amendment relationship between two documents. The algorithm takes two PDF documents preprocessed by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and NER (Named Entity Recognition) as input, and then it builds the features of each document pair and classifies the relationship. We experimented with different configurations on a dataset consisting of 1124 pairs of contract-amendment documents in English and French. The best result obtained a F1-score of 91%, which outperformed 23% compared to a heuristic-based baseline.

Clustering-based Automatic Construction of Legal Entity Knowledge Base from Contracts

In contract analysis and contract automation, a knowledge base (KB) of legal entities is fundamental for performing tasks such as contract verification, contract generation and contract analytic. However, such a KB does not always exist nor can be produced in a short time. In this paper, we propose a clustering-based approach to automatically generate a reliable knowledge base of legal entities from given contracts without any supplemental references. The proposed method is robust to different types of errors brought by pre-processing such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Named Entity Recognition (NER), as well as editing errors such as typos. We evaluate our method on a dataset that consists of 800 real contracts with various qualities from 15 clients. Compared to the collected ground-truth data, our method is able to recall 84\% of the knowledge.