Contract Eligibility Verification Enhanced by Keyword and Contextual Embeddings

Sangah Lee, Seokgi Kim, Eunjin Kim, Minji Kang, Hyopil Shin

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2022.49.10.848

Contracts need to be reviewed to be verified if they include all the essential clauses for them to be valid. Such clauses are highly formal and repetitive regardless of the kinds of contracts, and automated legal technologies are required for legal text comprehension. In this paper, we have constructed a simple item-by-item classification model for clauses in contracts to estimate contract eligibility by addressing formal and repetitive properties of contract clauses. We have used keyword embeddings based on conventional requirements of contracts and concatenate them to sentence embeddings of clauses, extracted from a BERT model fine-tuned with legal documents. The contract eligibility can be verified by the predicted labels. Based on our methods, we report reasonable performances with the accuracy of 90.57 and 90.64, and an F1-score of 93.27 and 93.26, using additional keyword embeddings with BERT embeddings.