ConReader: Exploring Implicit Relations in Contracts for Contract Clause Extraction

Understand

We study automatic Contract Clause Extraction (CCE) by modeling implicit relations in legal contracts.

• Existing CCE methods mostly treat contracts as plain text, creating a substantial barrier to understanding contracts of high complexity.
• In this work, we first comprehensively analyze the complexity issues of contracts and distill out three implicit relations commonly found in contracts, namely, 1) Long-range Context Relation that captures the correlations of distant clauses; 2) Term-Definition Relation that captures the relation between important terms with their corresponding definitions; and 3) Similar Clause Relation that captures the similarities between clauses of the same type.
• Then we propose a novel framework ConReader to exploit the above three relations for better contract understanding and improving CCE.