2022 SemanticAnnotationofLegalContra
- (Soavi et al., 2022) ⇒ Michele Soavi, Nicola Zeni, John Mylopoulos, and Luisa Mich. (2022). “Semantic Annotation of Legal Contracts with ContrattoA.” In: Informatics. doi:10.3390/informatics9040072
Subject Headings: ContrattoA System, ContrattoA Ontology.
Notes
- The paper explores Legal Text Semantic Annotation Tools, highlighting methodologies and their impact on legal informatics.
- The paper introduces an Ontology for Legal Contracts, detailing its structure and application in enhancing the semantic processing and understanding of legal documents. The ContrattoA ontology is founded on the core legal ontology UFO-L, which it enhances to meet the specialized requirements of contract law. It integrates concepts from Hohfeld’s theory of legal positions, offering a comprehensive framework to understand the various rights and duties associated with different contract parties. This enriched ontology facilitates the precise annotation and analysis of legal contracts, ensuring that both human users and automated systems can effectively interpret and manage legal texts.
- The paper discusses the conversion of Natural Language Documents into Formal Specifications, focusing on the process and tools necessary for translating legal contracts into smart contracts.
- The paper covers the development and significance of Smart Contracts, particularly how formal specifications derived from natural language texts are crucial in their creation.
- The paper utilizes Semantic Web Technologies in Legal Informatics, including RDF and OWL, to improve the annotation, interpretation, and management of legal documents.
- The paper addresses the use of Contract Management Systems, integrating semantic technologies to enhance features such as compliance checking and automated contract management.
- The paper emphasizes the importance of Algorithmic Analysis of Legal Documents, presenting tools like model checkers and the role of semantic annotations in facilitating these analyses.
Cited By
Quotes
Author Keywords
- Legal contract; semantic annotation; structural annotation; contract ontology; semantic annotation tool
Abstract
The aim of the research is to semi-automate the process of generating formal specifications from legal contracts in natural language text form. Towards this end, the paper presents a tool, named ContrattoA, that semi-automatically conducts semantic annotation of legal contract text using an ontology for legal contracts. ContrattoA was developed through two iterations where lexical patterns were defined for legal concepts and their effectiveness was evaluated with experiments. The first iteration was based on a handful of sample contracts and resulted in defining lexical patterns for recognizing concepts in the ontology; these were evaluated with an empirical study where one group of subjects was asked to annotate legal text manually, while a second group edited the annotations generated by ContrattoA. The second iteration focused on the lexical patterns for the core contract concepts of obligation and power where results of the first iteration were mixed. On the basis of an extended set of sample contracts, new lexical patterns were derived and those were shown to substantially improve the performance of ContrattoA, nearing in quality the performance of experts. The experiments suggest that good quality annotations can be generated for a broad range of contracts with minor refinements to the lexical patterns.
References
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 SemanticAnnotationofLegalContra | Michele Soavi Nicola Zeni John Mylopoulos Luisa Mich | Semantic Annotation of Legal Contracts with ContrattoA | 10.3390/informatics9040072 | 2022 |