Consistency detection in e-contract documents

Abstract

E-contracts are textual documents describing various details and dependencies in the contract. These dependencies and constraints in an e-contract can be differently stated in different parts of large documents. Determining inconsistencies in an e-contract document is a challenging task. We construct (a) a sentence dependency graph from natural languages sentences, and (b) contract element dependency graph from contract element dependencies existing in the contract document. We present a methodology with the combination of these two graphs that ensures the consistency of the contract. We also present evaluation of our approach on a sample contract document and present visualization for representing the graphs.