This paper presents a technique for the identification of participant slots in English language contracts. Taking inspiration from unsupervised slot extraction techniques, the system presented here uses a supervised approach to identify terms used to
refer to a genre-specific slot in novel contracts. We evaluate the system in multiple feature configurations to demonstrate that the best performing system in both genres of contracts omits the exact mention form from consideration---even though such mention forms are often the name of the slot under consideration---and is instead based solely on the dependency label and parent; in other words, a more reliable quantification of a party's role in a contract is found in what they do rather than what they are named.
Older legal texts are often scanned and digitized via Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which results in numerous errors. Although spelling and grammar checkers can correct much of the scanned text automatically, Named Entity Recognition (NER) is
challenging, making correction of names difficult. To solve this, we developed an ensemble language model using a transformer neural network architecture combined with a finite state machine to extract names from English-language legal text. We use the US-based English language Harvard Caselaw Access Project for training and testing. Then, the extracted names are subjected to heuristic textual analysis to identify errors, make corrections, and quantify the extent of problems. With this system, we are able to extract most names, automatically correct numerous errors and identify potential mistakes that can later be reviewed for manual correction.
