Mining e-contract documents to classify clauses

E-contracts begin as legal documents and end up as processes that help organizations abide by legal rules while fulfilling contract terms. As contracts are complex, their deployment is predominantly established and fulfilled with significant human involvement. One of the key difficulties with any kind of contract processing is the legal ambiguity, which makes it difficult to address any violation of the contract terms. Thus, there is a need to track clauses for the contract activities under execution and violation of clauses. This necessitates deriving clause patterns from e-contract documents and map to their respective activities for further monitoring and fulfillment of e-contracts during their enactment. In this paper, we present a classification approach to extract clause patterns from e-contract documents. This is a challenging task as activities and clauses are mostly derived from both legal and business process driven contract knowledge.

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