What to Read in a Contract? Party-Specific Summarization of Legal Obligations, Entitlements, and Prohibitions
Abhilasha Sancheti, Aparna Garimella, Balaji Srinivasan, Rachel Rudinger
Abstract
Reviewing and comprehending key obligations, entitlements, and prohibitions in legal contracts can be a tedious task due to their length and domain-specificity. Furthermore, the key rights and duties requiring review vary for each contracting party. In this work, we propose a new task of party-specific extractive summarization for legal contracts to facilitate faster reviewing and improved comprehension of rights and duties. To facilitate this, we curate a dataset comprising of party-specific pairwise importance comparisons annotated by legal experts, covering ~293K sentence pairs that include obligations, entitlements, and prohibitions extracted from lease agreements. Using this dataset, we train a pairwise importance ranker and propose a pipeline-based extractive summarization system that generates a party-specific contract summary. We establish the need for incorporating domain-specific notions of importance during summarization by comparing our system against various baselines using both automatic and human evaluation methods.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.909
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 14708–14725
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.909
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.909
- Cite (ACL):
- Abhilasha Sancheti, Aparna Garimella, Balaji Srinivasan, and Rachel Rudinger. 2023. What to Read in a Contract? Party-Specific Summarization of Legal Obligations, Entitlements, and Prohibitions. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 14708–14725, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- What to Read in a Contract? Party-Specific Summarization of Legal Obligations, Entitlements, and Prohibitions (Sancheti et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2023.emnlp-main.909.pdf