The Extent of Repetition in Contract Language

WS 2019  ·  Dan Simonson, Daniel Broderick, Jonathan Herr ·

Contract language is repetitive (Anderson and Manns, 2017), but so is all language (Zipf, 1949). In this paper, we measure the extent to which contract language in English is repetitive compared with the language of other English language corpora. Contracts have much smaller vocabulary sizes compared with similarly sized non-contract corpora across multiple contract types, contain 1/5th as many hapax legomena, pattern differently on a log-log plot, use fewer pronouns, and contain sentences that are about 20{\%} more similar to one another than in other corpora. These suggest that the study of contracts in natural language processing controls for some linguistic phenomena and allows for more in depth study of others.

PDF Abstract
No code implementations yet. Submit your code now

Tasks


Datasets


  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods


No methods listed for this paper. Add relevant methods here