FACTS: an approach to unearth legacy contracts

The large number of contracts in force in an enterprise becomes an important factor in making business decisions. Moreover, an enterprise must be able to respond to events that might affect existing contractual relationships. However, most enterprises do not have the capability to easily manage the life cycle of enterprise contracts. Current solutions bundled into products are typically only efficiently used when applied to new business contracts but not to legacy ones, which often constitute the majority of the contracts in an enterprise. Critical information in such contracts remains buried in the text of these documents, requiring a tedious and costly manual inspection task to extract the information required for their proper management. In this paper we present an approach, called FACTS, to automatically elicit legacy contracts information that enables the effective and efficient management of their lifecycle. The approach is based in the use of two object models in conjunction with information extraction techniques. Once relevant information in a contract is identified, it can either be automatically tagged with XML or simply extracted into a contract facts database. In both cases, relevant contract information becomes readily available through predefined or ad-hoc queries.