A corpus of Australian contract language

Abstract

Written contracts are a fundamental framework for economic and cooperative transactions in society. Little work has been reported on the application of natural language processing or corpus linguistics to contracts. In this paper we report the design, profiling and initial analysis of a corpus of Australian contract language. This corpus enables a quantitative and qualitative characterisation of Australian contract language as an input to the development of contract drafting tools. Profiling of the corpus is consistent with its suitability for use in language engineering applications. We provide descriptive statistics for the corpus and show that document length and document vocabulary size approximate to log normal distributions. The corpus conforms to Zipf's law and comparative type to token ratios are consistent with lower term sparsity (an expectation for legal language). We highlight distinctive term usage in Australian contract language. Results derived from the corpus indicate a longer prepositional phrase depth in sentences in contract rules extracted from the corpus, as compared to other corpora.

Software tools for the visualization of definition networks in legal contracts

“…Work more directly relevant to the high level aim of creating software-based tools to enhance the reading and writing of contracts is also potentially broad. Curtotti et al [4,5] review work including in the field of machine learning, the logical representation of legal rules, e-contracts and studies of corpora of contracts.…”

“…The corpus has been compiled from Australian contracts and contract drafts available on the web. Curtotti et al [5] report the profiling and analysis of an earlier version of the corpus. The current version of the corpus has been subjected to further data cleaning but is substantively the same as reported above.…”

“…We also utilize Canviz for web visualization of graphviz output. 5 On average, definitions represent 17.4% of the core text of contracts in the sub-corpus and these contracts on average used definitions 304 times. These latter results illustrate the significance of definition text as a component of such legal documents.…”

“…It is part of ongoing research on the development of softwarebased tools for reading and writing legal rules in contracts and legislation and aims to improve accessibility of legal documents and increase the efficiency and accuracy of legal rule creation [4,5,6]. This paper reports the development of prototype software tools demonstrating novel applications of visualizations for the representation and analysis of definition networks within contracts.…”

Enhancing the Visualization of Law

“…They use a word cloud to illustrate their point. 21 Matt Stiles at the Texas Tribune uses a word cloud to assess the legislative priorities of legislators, finding most Bills are concerned with community issues such as education.…”