A Contract Corpus for Recognizing Rights and Obligations

摘要

A contract is a legal document executed by two or more parties. It is important for these parties to precisely understand their rights and obligations that are described in the contract. However, understanding the content of a contract is sometimes difficult and costly, particularly if the contract is long and complicated. Therefore, a language-processing system that can present information concerning rights and obligations found within a given contract document would help a contracting party to make better decisions. As a step toward the development of such a language-processing system, in this paper, we describe the annotated corpus of contract documents that we built. Our corpus is annotated so that a language-processing system can recognize a party's rights and obligations. The annotated information includes the parties involved in the contract, the rights and obligations of the parties, the conditions and the exceptions under which these rights and obligations to take effect. The corpus was built based on 46 English contracts and 25 Japanese contracts drafted by lawyers. We explain how we annotated the corpus and the statistics of the corpus. We also report the results of the experiments for recognizing rights and obligations.