Summarization of Commercial Contracts

In this paper, we propose a novel system for providing summaries for commercial contracts such as Non- Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), employment agreements, etc. to enable those reviewing the contract to spend less time on such reviews and improve understanding as well. Since it is observed that a majority of such commercial documents are paragraphed and contain headings/topics followed by their respective content along with their context, we extract those topics and summarize them as per the user’s need. In this paper, we propose that summarizing such paragraphs/topics as per requirements is a more viable approach than summarizing the whole document. We use extractive summarization approaches for this task and compare their performance with human-written summaries. We conclude that the results of extractive techniques are satisfactory and could be improved with a large corpus of data and supervised abstractive summarization methods.