Transforming Natural Language Stateless Commercial Contracts into Computer Computable Contracts

Abstract

Since millennia, contracts have fulfilled a fundamental role to regulate the relation between entities. A contract can be abstracted as an agreement that defines rights and obligations between two or more parties; in this context, the calculation of the resulting rights and obligations, provided the agreement considerations, has fundamentally been a human task given the typical natural language nature of these agreements. This thesis analyses the context in which the outcome of a contract can be computer calculated and the validity of the calculated result, while proposing an algorithmic approach to transform a natural language contract, within the subset of contracts denominated “Stateless Commercial Contracts”, into a computer computable form compatible with tools already available within the legal industry.