Neural Contract Element Extraction Revisited

We investigate contract element extraction. We show that LSTM-based encoders perform better than dilated CNNs, Transformers, and BERT in this task. We also find that domain-specific WORD2VEC embeddings outperform generic pre-trained GLOVE embeddings. Morpho-syntactic features in the form of POS tag and token shape embeddings, as well as context-aware ELMO embeddings, do not improve performance. Several of these observations contradict choices or findings of previous work on contract element extraction and generic sequence labeling tasks, indicating that contract element extraction requires careful task-specific choices.