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ContractFrames: Bridging the Gap Between Natural Language and Logics in Contract Law

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11717))

Abstract

This paper introduces ContractFrames, a framework able to translate natural language texts referring to the different events related to the status of a purchase contract to logic clauses from a legal reasoning system called PROLEG. Diverse frames and rules have been developed for the extraction and storage of this event-centric information before its conversion to logic clauses. Our framework uses natural language tools and rules to extract relevant information, store it in the form of frames, and return the logic clauses of the input text. Also an ontology, called the Contract Workflow Ontology, has been developed to represent all the relevant information of the events related to a contract. The framework has been tested in a synthetic dataset, and showed promising results.

This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 17H06103 and by a project with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 780602. It has been also partially supported by a Predoctoral grant from the I+D+i program of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. This work has been done during an internship funded by the National Institute of Informatics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to Minsky [19], a frame is ‘a data-structure for representing a stereotyped situation’.

  2. 2.

    http://www.estrellaproject.org/lkif-core/norm.owl#Contract.

  3. 3.

    https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/frameIndex.xml?frame=Documents.

  4. 4.

    https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/frameIndex.xml?frame=Being_obligated.

  5. 5.

    https://framenet2.icsi.berkeley.edu/fnReports/data/frameIndex.xml?frame=Commerce_buy.

  6. 6.

    https://mnavasloro.github.io/ContractFrames/.

  7. 7.

    https://github.com/mnavasloro/ContractFrames.

  8. 8.

    https://mnavasloro.github.io/ContractFrames/datamodel.html.

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Correspondence to María Navas-Loro .

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Navas-Loro, M., Satoh, K., Rodríguez-Doncel, V. (2019). ContractFrames: Bridging the Gap Between Natural Language and Logics in Contract Law. In: Kojima, K., Sakamoto, M., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11717. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_9

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