Using semantics to process legal document updates
Christina Leber, Dan Yang, Luis Tari, Andrew W. Crapo, Aravind Chandramouli · 2013
In most information retrieval systems, updates to indexed documents are handled by either adding the new document to the index and incrementing a version field, or by completely replacing the old version by the new version. These approaches work well when the entire document text is updated, but are insufficient to appropriately handle partial updates in amendments that explicitly state what changes are made to legal contracts. We propose here an approach that parses contract amendments to understand how the amendment is altering the original contract and determine the new effective legal contract. This approach uses semantic modeling and rules to indicate the effective contract to information retrieval systems.