Contract Statements Knowledge Service for Chatbots

Towards conversational agents that are capable of handling more complex questions on contractual conditions, formalizing contract statements in a machine readable way is crucial. However, constructing a formal model which captures the full scope of a contract proves difficult due to the overall complexity its set of rules represent. Instead, this paper presents a top-down approach to the problem. After identifying the most relevant contract statements, we model their underlying rules in a novel knowledge engineering method. A user-friendly tool we developed for this purpose allows to do so easily and at scale. Then, we expose the statements as service so they can get smoothly integrated in any chatbot framework.