ContractFrames: Bridging the Gap Between Natural Language and Logics in Contract Law

This paper introduces ContractFrames, a framework able to translate natural language texts referring to the different events related to the status of a purchase contract to logic clauses from a legal reasoning system called PROLEG. Diverse frames and rules have been developed for the extraction and storage of this event-centric information before its conversion to logic clauses. Our framework uses natural language tools and rules to extract relevant information, store it in the form of frames, and return the logic clauses of the input text. Also an ontology, called the Contract Workflow Ontology, has been developed to represent all the relevant information of the events related to a contract. The framework has been tested in a synthetic dataset, and showed promising results.