Topic-Driven Contractual Language Understanding and Summarization: An Integrated Approach for Simplifying Legal Documents

This paper introduces a modularized tool specifically designed to simplify and condense complex legal contracts through the application of a transformer-based topic modeling paradigm. Employing the Contract Understanding Atticus Dataset (CUAD), the tool dissects contracts into seven discrete classes utilizing a supervised variant of BERTopic for training, thereby optimizing summarization efficiency. Subsequent to clustering texts into these classes, the resultant model undergoes summarization via Legal Pegasus, a model fine-tuned explicitly for the legal domain. Our innovative approach integrates contract segmentation and summarization by combining topic modeling and Legal Pegasus, providing a holistic solution for individuals without legal expertise, facilitating rapid comprehension and informed decision-making amidst the escalating complexity of legal documents.