ContractNLI is a dataset for document-level natural language inference (NLI) on contracts whose goal is to automate/support a time-consuming procedure of contract review. In this task, a system is given a set of hypotheses (such as “Some obligations of Agreement may survive termination.”) and a contract, and it is asked to classify whether each hypothesis is entailed by, contradicting to or not mentioned by (neutral to) the contract as well as identifying evidence for the decision as spans in the contract.

ContractNLI is the first dataset to utilize NLI for contracts and is also the largest corpus of annotated contracts (as of September 2021). ContractNLI is an interesting challenge to work on from a machine learning perspective (the label distribution is imbalanced and it is naturally multi-task, all the while training data being scarce) and from a linguistic perspective (linguistic characteristics of contracts, particularly negations by exceptions, make the problem difficult).