Towards Open-Set Contract Clause Recognition

Contract clause recognition is the process of discriminating legal clauses from ordinary sentences in contracts, and categorizing them accordingly. It is one of the most crucial tasks performed by human experts, typically lawyers from legal offices, when analyzing contracts, often for negotiation purposes. When manually executed, contract clause recognition is often time-consuming and error-prone. Traditional solutions based on machine learning leverage two-stepped approaches relying on anomalous contract clause detection and classification. Unfortunately, these approaches fail to deliver accurate results. In this paper, we propose a holistic approach, based on openset recognition algorithms, to the problem of contract clause recognition. Experimental results on benchmark data prove that the proposed solution is effective.