Linking External Sources to Legal Contracts using Semantic Similarity

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This project addresses the problem of automated processing of signed contracts in corporate environment. The industrial collaborator, the PACTA company, helps companies keep track of their signed contracts across teams, departments, and organizations. The project is focused on the task of identifying external document sources that may affect the contracts, such as relevant legal documents. Our approach is based on segmentation of documents and contracts, and semantic similarity using web n-gram corpora. This word n-gram based approach would be fully unsupervised, and it is extensible to language other than English. This approach is based on the existing expertise of the Dalhousie research team. The ultimate goal is to accelerate and improve search ability to find most appropriate candidate documents that are strongly related to the contract, reducing human effort in the process. The project will have a clear and measurable impact on PACTA's functionality and value proposition. The collaboration with Dalhousie University will be of benefit to both parties in that it will allow PACTA to deliver a new and innovative functionality to users at a faster pace and Dalhousie University to get access to a corpus of commercial agreements for future research and development. The result of the research contained in this proposal will enable the company to expand the services offering to its clients, and thereby enhance its competitive position and increase export potential of the services.