Hassan, F U; Le, T and Lv, X (2021) Addressing legal and contractual matters in construction using natural language processing: A critical review. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 147(9): 03121004, ISSN 0733-9364
Abstract
Claims, disputes, and litigations are major legal issues in construction projects, which often result in cost overruns, delays, and adverse working relationships among the contracting parties. Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) techniques offer great potentials that can process voluminous unstructured data from legal documents to draw insightful information about the root causes of issues and prevention strategies. Several efforts have been undertaken in the last decades that used NLP to tackle a wide range of problems related to legal issues in construction such as the quality review of contracts and the identification of common patterns in legal cases. The research line on NLP-based techniques for analyzing legal texts of construction projects has progressed well recently; it, however, is still in the early stage. This paper aims to perform a critical review of recently published articles to analyze the achievements and limitations of the state of the art on NLP-based approaches to address common legal issues associated with legal documents arising across different project stages. The study also provides a roadmap for future research to expand the adoption of NLP for the processing of legal texts in construction.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | artificial intelligence; claims; contracts; disputes; legal issues; linguistics; litigation; natural language processing; project requirements |
| Index terms: | artificial intelligence, prevention, legal issue, contracting party, litigation, cost overrun, dispute, documents, state of the art, contractual matter, construction project, strategy, unstructured data |
| Subjects: | professional development, financial risk, production management, contractual condition, management, financial and cost management, artificial intelligence, data science, legal systems, practitioner, dispute resolution, research dissemination and communication |
| Topics: | Digital Applications, Legal Issues, Contract Administration, Business Strategy, Cost Management, Information Management, Project Management, Research Practice, Roles and Professions |
| Descriptive scope: | 2 PC |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here