May 26, 2021, 11:49 a.m.
Legaltech (drafting, the workflow tooling, the review and negotiation), is important for what it is. But most of what is interesting in a contract isn’t the legal scaffolding, but instead the crucial terms and definitions. Analysis of the contract terms of importance to financial institutions is carried out within the fintech sphere.
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April 1, 2021, 2:44 p.m.
Featuring prominently among the more abstruse lawyering vocabulary are “R-pronouns” (e.g thereby, herein, wherefrom). Even when a normal human can figure out what is actually being said, thereafter it’s still quite a ways therefrom to what is being meant. Thereafter come linguists to the rescue.
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March 19, 2021, 1:16 p.m.
Institutions struggle to keep track of the latest versions of their contracts - and that’s if they actually know where they are in the first place. Beyond drafts, there is a constant layering of amendments and addenda. Contracts need to be turned into structured data, stored, and versioned.
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March 7, 2021, 3:38 p.m.
A stark repeating pattern from my years of applying NLP to financial services is this: most seemingly straightforward information extraction tasks lure you with the sweet siren song of simplicity, allowing you to get just comfortable enough before the bottom falls out.
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Creativity vs Wrongness: The Case of ChatGPT
On Chinese Rooms, Roman Numerals, and Neural Networks
When Everything Looks Like a Nail
Language Technology Needs Linguists, But Companies Need Convincing
Financial Contracts Are More Fintech than LegalTech
The Archaic Language Whereby Lawyers Draft
The Paper Hard Drive, or, Where are Our Contracts Anyway?
The Perilous Complexity of Information Extraction from Financial Contracts