ContractNLI: A Dataset for Document-level Natural Language Inference for Contracts

Yuta Koreeda, Christopher Manning


Abstract
Reviewing contracts is a time-consuming procedure that incurs large expenses to companies and social inequality to those who cannot afford it. In this work, we propose “document-level natural language inference (NLI) for contracts”, a novel, real-world application of NLI that addresses such problems. In this task, a system is given a set of hypotheses (such as “Some obligations of Agreement may survive termination.”) and a contract, and it is asked to classify whether each hypothesis is “entailed by”, “contradicting to” or “not mentioned by” (neutral to) the contract as well as identifying “evidence” for the decision as spans in the contract. We annotated and release the largest corpus to date consisting of 607 annotated contracts. We then show that existing models fail badly on our task and introduce a strong baseline, which (a) models evidence identification as multi-label classification over spans instead of trying to predict start and end tokens, and (b) employs more sophisticated context segmentation for dealing with long documents. We also show that linguistic characteristics of contracts, such as negations by exceptions, are contributing to the difficulty of this task and that there is much room for improvement.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.164
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1907–1919
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.164
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.164
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuta Koreeda and Christopher Manning. 2021. ContractNLI: A Dataset for Document-level Natural Language Inference for Contracts. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 1907–1919, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ContractNLI: A Dataset for Document-level Natural Language Inference for Contracts (Koreeda & Manning, Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.164.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.164.mp4
Code
 stanfordnlp/contract-nli-bert
Data
ContractNLI