A CNL for Contract-Oriented Diagrams
This work addresses the need for better tools to handle normative documents like contracts, but it is incremental as it presents a first step with limited application.
The authors tackled the problem of representing and manipulating contracts by introducing Contract-Oriented Diagrams and a Controlled Natural Language for verbalizing them, resulting in proof-of-concept web-based tools for editing and visualization applied to a small example.
We present a first step towards a framework for defining and manipulating normative documents or contracts described as Contract-Oriented (C-O) Diagrams. These diagrams provide a visual representation for such texts, giving the possibility to express a signatory's obligations, permissions and prohibitions, with or without timing constraints, as well as the penalties resulting from the non-fulfilment of a contract. This work presents a CNL for verbalising C-O Diagrams, a web-based tool allowing editing in this CNL, and another for visualising and manipulating the diagrams interactively. We then show how these proof-of-concept tools can be used by applying them to a small example.