Identifying Potential Conflicts between Norms in Contracts

Contracts formally represent agreements between parties and often involve the exchange of goods or services. In contracts, clauses define the behavior expected from parties in terms of deontic statements such as obligation, permission and prohibition. These normative clauses may contain conflicting deontic statements referring to the same party in the same context, producing inconsistencies in the normative structure of the contract. Our main contribution is an approach to detect potential conflicts between norms within contracts written in natural language. We use a rule-based approach and natural language processing, which result in promising empirical results. This constitutes a first step into automated processing of contracts in natural language.