| A contract is a legally binding agreement between participating parties specifying service requirements and expectations, and stakeholder rights and duties. Additionally, a contract provides a framework for resolution in case of breach of its terms. In current practice, contracts are produced as text documents usually drafted by contract lawyers, thus any insights such as service capabilities, business risks, and interaction relations are hidden in unstructured text. We address the challenge of discovering knowledge from thousands of contracts. To this end, we develop a comprehensive approach implemented as a system, Contract Miner, that is capable of extracting essential information from a large contract repository.;First, service exceptions such as product late delivery, payment default, and bankruptcy reveal critical aspects of business service operations. Though rarely studied before in connection with services, exception extraction can help uncover the potential risks an organization is exposed to. Contract Miner takes advantage of a handful of linguistic patterns to harvest service exceptions at the phrase level.;Second, business events form the backbone of business relationships and correspond to essential business processes such as purchase and payment. Business events, e.g., product delivery, bill payment, and bank interest accrual, are inherently temporally constrained. With a hybrid of linguistic patterns, grammar parsing, and classifications, Contract Miner extracts business events and their corresponding temporal constraints. It applies topic modeling to organize the event lexicon into thematic groups.;Third, normative relationships bear one of the most important aspect of contractual relations capturing commitments, authorizations, and prohibitions. Norms are studied intensively in multiagent systems. They yield guidance for implementing software agents as well as a basis for judging whether the parties are complying with the contract. Based on top of the methods for extracting service exceptions, business events and temporal constraints, Contract Miner uses supervised methods to extract normative relationships.;For experimentation, we apply a real-life repository consisting of thousands of contracts drawn from domains such as manufacturing, supply, and licensing. With human annotated data as gold standard, we evaluate the extraction performance in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure for each of the information extraction task. The results show the viability and promise of Contract Miner for extracting information and discovering knowledge from a large number of contracts. Our approach has widespread applications wherever contracts are employed. |
