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Domain adaptation for an automated classification of deontic modalities in software engineering contracts

Contracts are agreements between parties engaging in economic transactions. They specify deontic modalities that the signatories should be held responsible for and state the penalties or actions to be taken if the stated agreements are not met. Additionally, contracts have also been known to be source of Software Engineering (SE) requirements. Identifying the deontic modalities in contracts can therefore add value to the Requirements Engineering (RE) phase of SE. The complex and ambiguous language of contracts make it difficult and time-consuming to identify the deontic modalities (obligations, permissions, prohibitions), embedded in the text. State-of-art neural network models are effective for text classification; however, they require substantial amounts of training data. The availability of contracts data is sparse owing to the confidentiality concerns of customers. In this paper, we leverage the linguistic and taxonomical similarities between regulations (available abundantly in the public domain) and contracts to demonstrate that it is possible to use regulations as training data for classifying deontic modalities in real-life contracts. We discuss the results of a range of experiments from the use of rule-based approach to Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) for automating the classification of deontic modalities. With BERT, we obtained an average precision and recall of 90% and 89.66% respectively.