AI-assisted German Employment Contract Review: A Benchmark Dataset
This addresses the problem of applying NLP to legal contract reviews for lawyers, but it is incremental as it focuses on dataset creation rather than novel methods.
The authors tackled the scarcity of expert-annotated datasets for legal text by releasing an anonymized and annotated benchmark dataset for reviewing German employment contract clauses, alongside baseline model evaluations.
Employment contracts are used to agree upon the working conditions between employers and employees all over the world. Understanding and reviewing contracts for void or unfair clauses requires extensive knowledge of the legal system and terminology. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) hold promise for assisting in these reviews. However, applying NLP techniques on legal text is particularly difficult due to the scarcity of expert-annotated datasets. To address this issue and as a starting point for our effort in assisting lawyers with contract reviews using NLP, we release an anonymized and annotated benchmark dataset for legality and fairness review of German employment contract clauses, alongside with baseline model evaluations.