Conversion of Legal Agreements into Smart Legal Contracts using NLP

Eason Chen, Niall Roche, Yuen Hsien Tseng, Walter Hernandez, Jiangbo Shangguan, Alastair Moore

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

A Smart Legal Contract (SLC) is a specialized digital agreement comprising natural language and computable components. The Accord Project provides an open-source SLC framework containing three main modules: Cicero, Concerto, and Ergo. Currently, we need lawyers, programmers, and clients to work together with great effort to create a usable SLC using the Accord Project. This paper proposes a pipeline to automate the SLC creation process with several Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to convert law contracts to the Accord Project's Concerto model. After evaluating the proposed pipeline, we discovered that our NER pipeline accurately detects CiceroMark from Accord Project template text with an accuracy of 0.8. Additionally, our Question Answering method can extract one-third of the Concerto variables from the template text. We also delve into some limitations and possible future research for the proposed pipeline. Finally, we describe a web interface enabling users to build SLCs. This interface leverages the proposed pipeline to convert text documents to Smart Legal Contracts by using NLP models.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationACM Web Conference 2023 - Companion of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1112-1118
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781450394161
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023 Apr 30
Event2023 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2023 - Austin, United States
Duration: 2023 Apr 302023 May 4

Publication series

NameACM Web Conference 2023 - Companion of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2023

Conference

Conference2023 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAustin
Period2023/04/302023/05/04

Keywords

  • Blockchain
  • Domain Specific Language
  • Human-AI collaboration
  • Information Retrieval
  • Smart Legal Contract

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Software

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