Towards Disambiguating Contracts for their Successful Execution - A Case from Finance Domain

Contract management is key to financial services. Contracts lay down rules for doing business or present guidelines and recommendations for maximizing financial advantage of stakeholders in a given scenario. Contracts related to award of projects by companies to vendors, employment contracts, lease agreements, franchise agreement and even prenuptial agreements have significant financial implications. Making sense of contracts is an important step in achieving organizational goals such as building compliant systems, meeting delivery deadlines, avoiding heavy penalties and steering clear of expensive litigation. The complexity of “contracts language” however, makes it difficult to leverage the guidance they intend to offer. Contracts are written ex ante, based on forecasts rather than actual results, and may therefore contain ambiguous and incomplete guidance that can result in unintended violations. We address these problems by aiming to automate the disambiguation of contracts using a generalized architecture – R to (1) Recognize important essential information present in contracts, (2) Reason over the information elements to identify their interrelations and uncover ambiguities and inconsistencies, and (3) Render the information in a visual format (for example, Message Sequence Charts) depicting different elements in contractual obligations.