Contracts are arguably the most important type of business documents. Despite their significance in business, legal contract review largely remains an arduous, expensive and manual process. In this paper, we describe TECUS: a commercial system designed and deployed for contract understanding and used by a wide range of enterprise users for the past few years. We reflect on the challenges and design decisions when building TECUS. We also summarize the data science life cycle of TECUS and share lessons learned.

Ontology Alignment is an important research problem applied to various fields such as data integration, data transfer, data preparation, etc. State-of-the-art (SOTA) Ontology Alignment systems typically use naive domain-dependent approaches with handcrafted rules or domain-specific architectures, making them unscalable and inefficient. In this work, we propose VeeAlign, a Deep Learning based model that uses a novel dual-attention mechanism to compute the contextualized representation of a concept which, in turn, is used to discover alignments. By doing this, not only is our approach able to exploit both syntactic and semantic information encoded in ontologies, it is also, by design, flexible and scalable to different domains with minimal effort. We evaluate our model on four different datasets from different domains and languages, and establish its superiority through these results as well as detailed ablation studies. The code and datasets used are available at https://github.com/Remorax/VeeAlign.

Dialogue Acts play an important role in conversation modeling. Research has shown the utility of dialogue acts for the response selection task, however, the underlying assumption is that the dialogue acts are readily available, which is impractical, as dialogue acts are rarely available for new conversations. This paper proposes an end-to-end multi-task model for conversation modeling, which is optimized for two tasks, dialogue act prediction and response selection, with the latter being the task of interest. It proposes a novel way of combining the predicted dialogue acts of context and response with the context (previous utterances) and response (follow-up utterance) in a crossway fashion, such that, it achieves at par performance for the response selection task compared to the model that uses actual dialogue acts. Through experiments on two well known datasets, we demonstrate that the multi-task model not only improves the accuracy of the dialogue act prediction task but also improves the MRR for the response selection task. Also, the cross-stitching of dialogue acts of context and response with the context and response is better than using either one of them individually.

The utility of additional semantic information for the task of next utterance selection in an automated dialogue system is the focus of study in this paper. In particular, we show that additional information available in the form of dialogue acts –when used along with context given in the form of dialogue history– improves the performance irrespective of the underlying model being generative or discriminative. In order to show the model agnostic behavior of dialogue acts, we experiment with several well-known models such as sequence-to-sequence encoder-decoder model, hierarchical encoder-decoder model, and Siamese-based models with and without hierarchy; and show that in all models, incorporating dialogue acts improves the performance by a significant margin. We, furthermore, propose a novel way of encoding dialogue act information, and use it along with hierarchical encoder to build a model that can use the sequential dialogue act information in a natural way. Our proposed model achieves an MRR of about 84.8% for the task of next utterance selection on a newly introduced Daily Dialogue dataset, and outperform the baseline models. We also provide a detailed analysis of results including key insights that explain the improvement in MRR because of dialog act information.