What to Read in a Contract? Party-Specific Summarization of Legal Obligations, Entitlements, and Prohibitions

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09825v2
• Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2023 20:43:40 GMT
• Title: What to Read in a Contract? Party-Specific Summarization of Legal Obligations, Entitlements, and Prohibitions
• Authors: Abhilasha Sancheti, Aparna Garimella, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan, Rachel Rudinger
• Abstract summary: Reviewing key obligations, entitlements, and prohibitions in legal contracts can be a tedious task due to their length and domain-specificity. We propose a new task of party-specific extractive summarization for legal contracts to facilitate faster reviewing and improved comprehension of rights and duties.
• Score: 27.92767201633733
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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 notion of importance during summarization by comparing our system against various baselines using both automatic and human evaluation methods

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