State-of-the-Art Review

Addressing Legal and Contractual Matters in Construction

Using Natural Language Processing: A Critical Review
Fahad ul Hassan, S.M.ASCE 1; Tuyen Le, A.M.ASCE 2; and Xuan Lv 3

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. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)
CO.1943-7862.0002122. © 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
Author keywords: Legal issues; Disputes; Artificial intelligence; Natural language processing (NLP); Contracts; Project requirements;
Litigation; Claims; Linguistics.

Introduction that often require complex, time-consuming, and costly solutions.

Legal issues such as disputes are common in construction projects
due to the natural complexity in terms of size, disciplines, and the
number of separate parties (Younis et al. 2008). These disputes gen-
erally cause significant loss of time and money for the stakeholders
(Walsh 2017). Research has repeatedly reported that the use of
natural language in legal documents is among the leading causes
of legal issues, necessitating advanced techniques in text process-
ing (Lee et al. 2019). Examples of well-known linguistic issues of
construction contracts include vagueness and ambiguities (Çevikol
and Aydemir 2019) or biased clauses that shift risk to one party
(Lee et al. 2019). The client often maliciously modifies the contrac-
tual terms and specifications to shift risks to the contractors (Lee
et al. 2019). The conflict in each party’s understanding of their roles
and obligations provided in the contracts would mostly lead to con-
struction disputes (Chong 2012; Rajoo 2010; Walsh 2017). Zait and
Zarour (2019) reported the imprecise inferences of contractual
terms as a major cause of disagreements leading to project failures.
Furthermore, the traditional method of checking the compliance of a
project with construction laws and regulations such as design codes
or safety procedures is prone to errors due to the manual process-
ing of voluminous regulatory texts (Zhang and El-Gohary 2016a).
Noncompliance can lead to redesign, rework, and monetary losses
1
Ph.D. Student, Glenn Dept. of Civil Engineering, Clemson Univ.,
Clemson, SC 29634. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2308-2606.
Email: fhassan@g.clemson.edu
2
Assistant Professor, Glenn Dept. of Civil Engineering, Clemson Univ.,
Clemson, SC 29634 (corresponding author). ORCID: https://orcid.org
/0000-0002-8606-9214. Email: tuyenl@clemson.edu
3
Assistant Professor, Moss School of Construction, Infrastructure and
Sustainability, Florida International Univ., Miami, FL 33174. Email:
xulv@fiu.edu
Note. This manuscript was published online on July 7, 2021. Discussion
period open until December 7, 2021; separate discussions must be sub-
mitted for individual papers. This paper is part of the Journal of Construc-
tion Engineering and Management, © ASCE, ISSN 0733-9364.
Therefore, automated methods to augment engineers in drafting, re-
viewing, and processing contractual and legal requirements has
emerged as a critical need to minimize legal matters in construction
(Çevikol and Aydemir 2019; Pishdad-Bozorgi and De La Garza
2012; Shen et al. 2017).
The implementation of natural language processing (NLP), a
branch of artificial intelligence, particularly for natural languages
such as texts and speeches, has been demonstrated as a promising
solution in the literature to improve the contract quality, comprehen-
sion, and management (Arora et al. 2015; Zait and Zarour 2019).
NLP offers a collection of techniques to process the natural language
text for many applications such as machine translation, speech rec-
ognition, information retrieval, and text classification (Manning and
Schütze 1999). Recent advances in machine learning–based NLP
have offered unprecedented opportunities for the construction do-
main to prevent potential human errors in provisions and legal issues
(Zait and Zarour 2019). NLP can support the contract drafting and
reviewing process to ensure precise scope comprehension along
with the identification of any poisonous clauses. In addition, NLP
can assist in verifying consistency across multiple contracts as well
as the compliance checking of construction activities in accordance
with the project requirements, codes, and regulatory documents.
However, the body of knowledge lacks a holistic understanding
of the previously developed NLP frameworks to control legal issues
and any gaps that merit further research.
This study has two primary objectives. The first objective is to
conduct a comprehensive review of existing NLP frameworks de-
veloped by previous researchers in the construction domain. The
limitations of existing frameworks in addressing legal issues in con-
struction are also examined. To achieve this objective, the study
investigated a number of articles published in high-impact journals
in the last decades on the implementation of NLP to reduce the
likelihood of legal disputes or litigation. The second objective of
the study is to report potential areas requiring more research where
the capability of NLP should be explored. The findings of this
study will help the practitioners and researchers to understand

© ASCE 03121004-1 J. Constr. Eng. Manage.

better the current body of knowledge and future research needs in
the utilization of NLP in addressing legal issues in construction.
Background
Common Causes of Legal Issues Associated with
Legal Documents in Construction
Disputes between the stakeholders of a construction project such as
the owner, designer, contractor, and subcontractors during the ex-
ecution of a construction project are prevalent (Kilian 2003). Any
dispute that cannot be resolved by negotiation efforts would lead to
costly litigation and cause significant negative impacts on the fi-
nancial condition and reputation of all parties (Jagannathan and
Delhi 2020). Studies have reported a serious increase in litigation
in construction projects over the past years, necessitating the need
for new solutions to reduce the litigation in construction by con-
trolling the causes that actually lead to the litigation (Mitkus and
Mitkus 2014).
Many legal issues in the construction industry are associated
with the natural language in the following two common types
of legal documents: (1) contracts, and (2) laws and regulations
(Cakmak and Cakmak 2013). Contract drafting has been repeat-
edly reported as a major source of legal disputes (Cakmak and
Cakmak 2013; Kumar Viswanathan et al. 2020). One of the most
common source of legal disputes associated with contract draftin
issue is the lack of clarity in contracts resulting in poor understand-
ing among the contracting parties regarding their roles and obli-
gations provided in contracts (Chong 2012; Rajoo 2010; Walsh
2017). Mitkus and Mitkus (2014) found that contracts with incom-
plete requirements often lead to design changes and associated dis-
putes. Missing critical contractual information also adversely affects
construction work quality (Jagannathan and Delhi 2020). Besides,
incomplete project requirements in a subcontract often lead to dis-
agreements among the contracting parties (Sun and Meng 2009).
The misinterpretation of contracts is another primary reason behind
conflicts or even legal issues in construction projects (Chan and
Suen 2005). Such misinterpretations of contractual terminologies
are caused by lexical ambiguities (i.e., polysemes) (Berry et al.
2003) or syntactic ambiguities (i.e., sentence structure) (Zait and
Zarour 2019). Azghandi-Roshnavand (2019) found 24 sources
of ambiguities related to the following types of clauses: roles
and responsibilities, dispute resolution, insurance and bonds, pay-
ment conditions, transportation criteria, criteria related to testing,
defects, and damages. Furthermore, the use of poisonous clauses in
contracts also causes disagreements among the contracting parties
in dispute resolutions (Lee et al. 2019). These biased clauses are
often added in construction contracts by the owner to shift the
maximum risks to contractors and other parties (Lee et al. 2019;
Youssef et al. 2018).
In addition to contracts, the violation of regulatory codes and
laws has been cited as a main source of legal issues in construction.
These errors often lead to redesign, rework, and consequently con-
tract disputes due to monetary loss (Almutairi et al. 2020; Kilian
and Gibson 2005). One major cause of design errors was found to
be the unfamiliarity with relevant and up-to-date design codes, con-
struction laws, and regulations among engineers (Yap et al. 2018).
Design errors also occur due to the use of inefficient methods of
compliance checking of designs with relevant standards and laws
(Cakmak and Cakmak 2013). The traditional compliance checking
methods are time-consuming and prone to human errors due to the
reliance on manual code reading and extraction of rules (Zhang and
El-Gohary 2016a). NLP has become an emerging technique that
© ASCE 03121004-2
can help improve compliance checking, thus reducing violations of
laws and regulations in construction.
Natural Language Processing
As discussed earlier, many legal issues in construction are strongly
associated with the use of natural language in legal documents
(Chong 2012; Walsh 2017); thus, recent advances in NLP offer a
great potential to improve the drafting, reading, reviewing, compre-
hension, and management of legal texts. NLP is a brand of artificial
intelligence (AI) that refers to a set of advanced computational
techniques capable of enabling computers to understand the lin-
guistics data in the natural language such as speeches and texts
(Chowdhury 2003). Examples of NLP tasks include machine trans-
lation, information extraction, and opinion mining (Manning and
Schütze 1999). NLP extracts and processes linguistic information
ranging from the syntactic level of words such as the occurrence
frequency and their part of speech (POS) to the grammatical depend-
encies between linguistic units and to the semantics of individual
words and sequences of words such as sentences or documents.
Fundamental NLP Techniques
The most fundamental NLP techniques include POS tagging,
dependency parsing, and lemmatization. POS tagging assigns POS
tags (i.e., noun, verb, adjective) to each linguistic unit in the text
which are then used to perform certain text processing tasks, for in-
stance, information extraction (Cutting et al. 1992). Dependency
parsing generates the parsed tree indicating the grammatical structure
of a sentence where the grammatical relationships between the words
included in the sentence are shown (Kübler et al. 2009). The depend-
ency information is also useful for information extraction tasks. In
addition, lemmatization mainly restricts the different grammatical
forms of a word to its root form (Balakrishnan and Ethel 2014).
For instance, constructs, constructed, and construction can be re-
turned to the same root form construct. A few other basic NLP tech-
niques include tokenization (conversion of a series of text into
individual tokens), lowercasing (converts the whole text into a single
lowercase format), and removal of punctuations and stopwords (re-
move all punctuations and stopwords such as the, is, of, etc.)
(Runeson et al. 2007). This linguistic data extracted using NLP is
used to infer meaningful information such as locations, time, actions,
and topics (Chi et al. 2017; Mollá et al. 2006; Moon et al. 2021). In
the context of legal texts, NLP has the potential to obtain legal con-
cepts, including but not limited to the following: obligation, parties,
rights, and penalties. These concepts serve as the input information
that the computer can utilize to automatically assess the quality of the
contractual document or examine patterns of legal cases.
NLP Approaches to Text Processing
NLP-based information extraction algorithms can be categorized
into the following two common approaches: rule-based and ma-
chine learning–based text processing (Salama and El-Gohary 2013).
Human-crafted rules are often used when relatively high perfor-
mance is required (Li et al. 2012). For example, to support distin-
guishing between obligation and rights, a keyword such as must
can be used as a criterion rule. Manually constructed rules yield
higher results, but that high performance is achieved at the cost of
the large human effort required in developing those rules (Manning
and Schütze 1999). Rule-based methods produce very robust mod-
els for specific applications due to the human involvement in rules
development. A simple rule-based model is founded on a set of
IF-THEN rules in which the rule part after IF reflects the condition
and the rule part after THEN is the conclusion (Liu et al. 2014).
Compared with the rule-based approach, machine learning (ML)
is considered more robust and greatly scalable (Li et al. 2012). ML is
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a process that first learns from the completed examples during the
training phase to apply the gained knowledge to perform the same
task on unseen samples in the testing phase (Sebastiani 2002). ML
typically relies on examples to make predictions on new instances.
ML can be of two types: (1) supervised learning, in which the la-
beled text data is provided during the training phase (Sebastiani
2002); and (2) unsupervised learning, in which the model learns
automatically on its own from the corpus without any labeled data
or instructions (Ozgur 2004). Several ML algorithms have been de-
veloped by the researchers in the computer science domain that can
be applied to develop applications for other disciplines. The most
commonly used supervised learning algorithms include the naïve
Bayes (NB), support vector machines (SVM), logistic regression
(LR), k-nearest neighbor (kNN), decision tree (DT), and the deep
learning algorithms such as neural networks. Among these, the SVM
algorithm which generates a hyperplane to classify text is reported as
the best performing algorithm in most cases (Yasodha and Prakash
2012). An extra benefit of using SVM is the presence of kernels
which help it to process nonlinear data as well (Yasodha and
Prakash 2012). On the other hand, the probabilistic algorithms,
including NB and LR, are comparatively simple than SVM yet
produce promising results (Domingos 2012). The probabilistic al-
gorithms also produce probability values implying the confidence
level of the predictions. In contrast, proximity-based algorithms
such as kNN process the test data by identifying the labels of its
k nearest matches in training data (Yuan et al. 2008). Although DT
algorithm is the simplest and easy to understand, it is highly sus-
ceptible to overfitting (Apté et al. 1994). DT algorithm uses a tree
structure where the nodes of the tree represent a series of rules used
to process the text. Recently, neural networks such as convolutional
neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) have
gained much attention due to their higher performance in text
processing tasks (Kamath et al. 2018; Kowsari et al. 2017). RNN
is generally applied in long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated
recurrent unit (GRU) architectures. However, the neural networks
require larger training data as well as longer training time than the
other supervised algorithms (Kowsari et al. 2019).
Vectorization of Textual Data
Text processing using machine learning typically requires the input
text data to be converted into a computer-understandable numerical
format (Baker et al. 2020). Two common word embeddings methods
used for converting text data into numerical format are: (1) bag-of-
words (BOW), and (2) word embeddings. BOW is a vector space
model which converts the whole corpus into a bag of unique words
ignoring the context and sequential information of the words in cor-
pus (Gonçalves and Quaresma 2004). In BOW, each document
or sentence of the target corpus is represented by a vector of N el-
ements where N corresponds to the total number of unique words in
the corpus (Orsenigo et al. 2018). The elements of the vector can
either be zero or a real number implying the absence or occurrence
frequency of a certain word, respectively. The occurrence frequency
of a word typically indicates the unique power of word in predicting
a certain output (i.e., topics of a text) (Sebastiani 2002). The word
frequencies are also commonly weighted to identify discriminat-
ing words using following two methods: term frequency (TF),
and term frequency-invert document frequency (TF-IDF). TF is a
simple method in which the weight indicates the frequency of a
word in a sentence normalized by the sentence length (Robertson
and Spärck Jones 1994). This method assigns higher weights to
the words that occur frequently in a corpus. However, certain words
including domain specific stop words occur frequently in corpus,
but they carry less discriminating power to predict an output. There-
fore, in order to identify actual discriminating words, the TF-IDF
© ASCE 03121004-3
method is often used (Sebastiani 2002). The IDF parameter in this
method weighs down high frequency words while it scales up the
weights of rare terms to identify actual discriminating words in a
corpus (Salton and Buckley 1988).
Recently, word embeddings have been increasingly used by re-
searchers for representation of text as numerical vectors due to the
capability of capturing the contextual and semantic information in
text (Gutiérrez-Batista et al. 2019). Unlike BOW, which produces
a vector for each sentence, word embeddings use a pretrained vec-
tor space model to generate a unique fixed-length n-dimensional
vector for each word in the corpus (Gutiérrez-Batista et al. 2019;
Wei et al. 2019). Distribution models are used to measure the
semantic similarity between terms according to their context in cor-
pus. Word embeddings typically generate a high-dimensional vec-
tor space where the vectors of words appearing in same context in a
corpus are adjacent to each other due to high semantic similarity
among them. Two state-of-the-art methods used to generate word
embeddings include word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013) and Glove
(Pennington et al. 2014). Word2vec is generally applied in two ar-
chitectures: (1) continuous bag of words (CBOW), and (2) skip-
gram. CBOW combined the vector representations of surrounding
words to predict the target word, whereas skip-gram uses the vector
representation of target word to predict the surrounding words or
context. In addition, Glove is a vector space model trained on a
global occurrence matrix based on the assumption that the proba-
bility of co-occurrence of two words is equal to the dot product of
their corresponding vectors.
Review Scope and Methodology
This paper involves a literature review of the academic articles that
focus on the utilization of NLP in addressing legal issues in the
construction field. The study adopted a modified four-step standard
literature review methodology proposed by Arksey and O’Malley
(2005). Fig. 1 shows the steps involved in the methodology. First,
the research questions, along with the extent and range of research,
were identified. Second, a keyword-based literature search was
used to collect relevant studies from the selected search engines
and journals. In the third step, the screening of the collected articles
was carried out by reading the abstracts and the conclusions to
identify closely related papers. The fourth step involved an in-depth
critical review of the screened articles to collate, summarize, and
report the research findings. Additionally, the leading research gaps
in the current body of knowledge were also identified to highlight
the potential future research areas.
As noted earlier, the goal of this study is to review current
NLP frameworks and their limitations in addressing the legal issues
in construction domain, as identified earlier in the Background
section. Relevant articles were collected using several search en-
gines and databases, including Google Scholar, ASCE Library,
Engineering Village, ASCE Civil Engineering Database, Research
Gate, Web of Science, and Scopus. The study adopted the keyword-
based search method, which has been widely used by many
Fig. 1. Methodology of the literature review process.
J. Constr. Eng. Manage.
Table 1. Number of reviewed papers by publication type
Initial number Final number
Publication type of publications of publications
Journal articles 31 19
Conference papers 14 9
Total 45 28

researchers to collect relevant articles (Deng and Smyth 2013; Lin

and Shen 2007; Xue et al. 2010; Yi and Chan 2014). The keywords
included “construction”, “legal issues”, “disputes”, “litigation”,
“claims”, “change orders”, “contracts”, “laws”, “codes”, and “natu-
ral language processing”, along with their variations in spellings
and tenses. Only relevant papers published in high-impact journals
and conference proceedings were considered. Initially, a total of
45 articles were collected. Of those, 31 were published in journals
while the remaining 14 were published in the proceedings (as illus-
trated in Table 1). The papers were then screened by reviewing their
abstracts and conclusions. The articles irrelevant to the research
goal were then discarded. As a result of this stage, a total of 28
articles were found to be relevant, which were critically reviewed
by the authors.
Results
Descriptive Results
Publication Trend of NLP-Based Research in
the Past Two Decades
To help the reader understand the overall trend of NLP-related
research to address legal issues in construction, a summary of col-
lected articles by year is illustrated in Fig. 2. As shown, there is a
significant increase in the number of articles throughout the past
decade, indicating that more and more researchers are interested
in using NLP to handle legal issues in the construction field. Ac-
cording to the articles reviewed in this study, no article was found
before 2000. From that time on, relatively few articles that met the
keyword search criteria were published in the first 10 years. How-
ever, an increase in the trend was observed between 2011 and 2015,
with 6 papers published in the period. Especially within the last six
years, from 2016 to 2021, 19 papers were found. This jump in the
number of publications shows that studies on the topic are signifi-
cantly emerging.
Fig. 3. Distribution of reviewed papers based on the publication
source.
Distribution of Publications by Journal
The distribution of the reviewed articles based on the publication
source is shown in Fig. 3. The review revealed eight journal sour-
ces with at least one article on NLP implementation to prevent
legal issues. As shown, the maximum number of articles (7 articles)
was published in the Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,
while Automation in Construction published 5 articles. Moreover,
many journals and proceedings contributed one article each. Over-
all, a total 9 articles were published in the different conference
proceedings.
Themes of State-of-the-Art Research on NLP
Approaches to Construction Legal Matters
Although an emerging number of researchers have investigated the
ability of NLP to address legal issues in the construction domain,
this line of research in construction is still at a very early stage. This
study found that existing NLP models primarily aimed to address
the legal issues associated with different legal documents. Accord-
ingly, the present review study classified the state-of-the-art on
NLP to address legal issues in construction into three categories
according to types of legal documents (see Fig. 4): (1) contracts,
(2) regulatory codes and standards, and (3) legal cases. As shown in

Fig. 4. Number of NLP publication addressing legal issues associated

Fig. 2. Publication trend of the NLP related articles over time. with different types of legal documents.

© ASCE 03121004-4 J. Constr. Eng. Manage.

the figure, previous studies have focused more on the contract-
related legal issues with 13 publications as compared with other le-
gal documents. The use of NLP to analyze regulatory codes and
standards is also well studied with 11 publications. The following
sections provide a detailed critical analysis of prior studies found in
this state-of-the-art review for each of the categories.
NLP-Aided Contract Review
This critical review found that various studies have been conducted
to explore the ability of NLP in improving contract drafting with
the ultimate aim of enabling contracting parties to be aware of their
rights, obligations, and the associated risks before signing the con-
tract. Relevant studies in this regard, as summarized in Table 2,
have been focused on tackling the following challenges: automated
detection of ambiguities, automated detection of risk-prone clauses,
and requirement structuring for ease of contract administration.
Details of NLP-based approaches to address those three areas are
as follows.
Automated Detection of Ambiguities. This review found only one
study that aimed at improving the clarity of a contract draft through
automated detection of ambiguous linguistic units. That study by
Curtotti and McCreath (2011) used corpus profiling and chunk
analysis to examine the distinctive characteristics of the contract
language compared with general English. The authors specifically
compared the contract corpus of one million words with two gen-
eral English corpora, including Brown and Reuter corpora. They
found that the contract corpus is less sparse than the general English
corpora, which means that the contract corpus includes specific
well-defined terms and sentence structure. The descriptive statistics
reported the following distinctive terms of the contract corpus:
agreement, shall, party, clause, services, etc., whereas that of
the general corpora are but, was, his, they, would, etc. The analysis
also revealed the frequent use of lengthy sentences and prepositions
in contract language, whereas the use of past tense and pronouns in
contract language is less common. The authors suggested the use of
these unique characteristics of contract language as an input for the
development of a software-based contract drafting tool. They envi-
sioned a tool that would assist contract drafters in detecting uncom-
mon legal terms, prepositional phrase which would help to
minimize ambiguities.
Automated Detection of Poisonous Clauses. Another focus of the
literature regarding contract review was to develop NLP techniques
to support risk assessment of construction clauses. The first con-
tribution in this line of research was made by Serag et al.
(2010) who used parsing along with ontology and reasoners to de-
tect high-risk clauses and conflicts between general conditions and
supplementary conditions. The named entity extractors were used
to parse the input clause. The extracted information is then con-
verted into a structured logical format of ontology. The reasoner
module detects the conflict or similarity of the input clause
with the well-known risk-prone clauses included in a database pro-
duced from previous post-project reviews. However, since the
authors did not evaluate the model, the effectiveness of the model
in identifying conflicts and risk-prone clauses is not known yet.
Another model developed by Lee et al. (2019) used rule-based
NLP to detect poisonous FIDIC clauses that are more biasedly
favorable to the owner. The method includes the development
of a lexicon describing the semantic elements of contract clauses
(i.e., actors, payment, action), a contract parser using dependency
parsing (DP) and syntactic rules for extracting the semantic infor-
mation from clauses, and a set of hand-coded rules for identifying
poisonous clauses based on the information extracted. The method
showed reliable results with an F-score of 81.8% on a test dataset
prepared by human experts. This approach was also adopted by
© ASCE 03121004-5
Lee et al. (2020) to predict if a FIDIC clause is favorable to the
contractor. This prediction-based model reported an F-score of
80.0%. Despite the impressive results, the method is less scalable
due to the reliance on manual development of rules, which seems
tedious and may not perform well on other standards contracts such
as the American Institute of Architects (AIA). More importantly, it
is impossible to develop generic rules applicable to all types of text,
as acknowledged by Lee et al. (2019). To address the drawbacks of
rule-based approaches, another intelligent NLP framework, namely
the “risk-o-meter”, for assessing risk-prone clauses was developed
by Chakrabarti et al. (2019) using supervised ML algorithms such
as NB and SVM. To prepare train data, they converted contractual
text into numeric vectors using word embeddings and labeled the
data with one of the following risk categories: liability, indemnity,
and confidentiality. The ML-based risk-o-meter model outper-
formed the previously discussed rule-based model developed by
Lee et al. (2019). The risk-o-meter revealed the optimal performance
of 92% for accuracy and 86% for F-measure when being trained
with SVM. This superior performance compared with the rule-based
approach is because the ML-based detection of risk-prone clauses
enables the self-learning of complex relationships between input
text features.
Structuring Text for Ease of Contractual Requirements
Management. Another line of NLP approaches to tackle legal is-
sues related to natural language contracts was focused on develop-
ing classification models using mostly ML for structuring the text
in the contract documents to facilitate ease of contract review. The
first effort in this area was made by Caldas et al. (2002), who de-
veloped a model for classifying the information in construction
documents into thirteen topics (general, schedule, plumbing,
HVAC, etc.) using supervised ML. They used the term frequency-
inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) to extract text features. They
tested three different algorithms such as NB, SVM, kNN, and com-
pared them with existing commercial text mining tools such as
Rocchio and IBM Miner for Text miner using a test set comprising
845 text instances. The SVM model achieved the highest accuracy
of 91.12%, whereas the kNN model reported the lowest perfor-
mance of 49.11% accuracy. Addressing the same classification
problem but using a new approach, Caldas and Soibelman (2003)
developed a hierarchical text classification model with more de-
tailed labels indicating the 121 CSI Master Format items. Among
these, 16 items were included in level 1 of label hierarchy, 52 items
in level 2 of label hierarchy, and 53 items were included in level 3 of
label hierarchy. The accuracy of 95.88% achieved for level 1 labels
by the hierarchical method on a dataset of 3030 documents was
higher than the flat text classification method used in the earlier
model. The performance was dropped to 86.37% for classifying
documents into labels at level 3 of hierarchy. Similar to the previous
study, this study also found that SVM was superior to other ML
alternatives. Recently, Hassan and Le (2020) developed a highly re-
liable classification model with a recall of 95% using ML to distin-
guish between requirement and nonrequirement text in contracts.
The best recall of 95% was reported by the SVM algorithm which
outperformed other different algorithms, including rule-based algo-
rithm, NB, LR, and feedforward neural network (FNN). The rule-
based method could reach a recall of 90.6% only. In contrast with
previous studies in which the authors used ML for structuring the
text in contracts, Al Qady and Kandil (2010) used other approaches
including shallow parsing to identify the tags (i.e., noun, verbs, sub-
ject) for each language unit in a clause and their dependencies to
facilitate the organization of clauses based on the information ex-
tracted such as types of actors, types of required action. The study
by Al Qady and Kandil (2010) performs the information organiza-
tion using linguistic units such as active subjects, verbs, and passive
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© ASCE
Table 2. Summary of studies on NLP-assisted contract review
Topic Specific solution
Automated detection Automated detection of ambiguities
of ambiguities associated with domain-specific words,
prepositions, and conjunctions
Automated detection Identification of conflicting and
of poisonous clauses risk-prone clauses
Identification of poisonous clauses
Identification of contractor-friendly
clauses
Extraction of risk-prone clauses from
legal documents
Structuring text for Contractual requirement classification
ease of contract review
and management
Contractual requirement classification
03121004-6
Contractual requirement recognition
Concept relation extraction from
contracts
Automated extraction of subcontract
scope
Automated extraction of subcontract
scope
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Approach
Corpus profiling and chunk analysis
Named entity extraction, ontology
and logical reasoning
Rule-based information extraction
method
Rule-based NLP method
ML-based text classification
ML-based text classification
ML-based hierarchical text
classification
Rule-based and ML-based binary
text classification
Shallow parsing and rules
ML-based text classification
ML-based text classification
Methodology description Performance References
Compared a contract corpus with two N/A Curtotti and
general English corpora to identify the McCreath (2011)
specific qualitative and quantitative
characteristics of contract language
Developed a reasoner that compares the N/A Serag et al. (2010)
logic facts with logic rules to identify
conflicting and risk-prone clauses
Utilized NLP along with semantic and 81.8% (F-score) Lee et al. (2019)
syntactic rules to extract the poisonous
clauses from contracts
Rules-based framework for identifying 85.7% (precision), Lee et al. (2020)
contractor-friendly clauses 75.0% (recall),
80.0% (F-score)
Developed an automated model 94% (accuracy), Chakrabarti et al.
“risk-o-meter” to detect the 86% (F-score) (2019)
risk-prone paragraphs in contracts
Categorized the contract documents into 91.12% (accuracy) Caldas et al. (2002)
thirteen categories using ML algorithms
Performed the hierarchical text 95.88% (accuracy) Caldas and
classification to classify the contract Soibelman (2003)
documents into sixteen categories using
ML algorithms
Classified the contractual text into 98.15% (recall) Hassan and
requirements and nonrequirements using Le (2020)
ML algorithms
Utilized shallow parsing to perform 68% (F-measure) Al Qady and
syntactic segmentation of contract clauses Kandil (2010)
and extract active concepts, passive
concepts, and relations
Used ML to classify main contract 94.18% (accuracy) Hassan et al. (2020)
requirements into different categories
corresponding to subcontract disciplines
Compared the performance of ML and deep 93.08 (recall) Hassan and
learning algorithms in classifying general Le (2021)
DB contract requirements into different
categories such as design, construction, and
O&M
subjects in comparison with previous studies in which the infor-
mation organization was performed based on complete clauses.
The proposed system used the Sundance shallow syntactic parser
(Riloff and Phillips 2004) to segment a contract clause into active
concepts (i.e., the client and the contractor), passive concepts
(i.e., work items), and their relations (i.e., action). When being
evaluated on general conditions of the standard form construction
contract, the proposed sentence parsing system achieved an F-score
of 68% in comparison with the 76% reported by human annotators
who used conventional method.
A few authors also developed NLP models for structuring the
requirements of DB contracts to support automated subcontract
scope extraction. Hassan et al. (2020) implemented supervised ML
algorithms including NB, SVM, LR, kNN, DT, and FNN to de-
velop a model that can extract subcontractor scope from the design-
build (DB) contracts. The model can classify DB requirements into
three categories indicating different disciplines namely design, con-
struction, and operation and maintenance (O&M). The models
were evaluated on a dataset of 2634 DB requirements where the
LR model achieved the highest accuracy of 94.18% and the NB
model revealed the lowest accuracy of 87.48%. Following this
study, Hassan and Le (2021) compared the performance of tradi-
tional ML and deep learning in the classification of DB require-
ments. They tested a total of eight different machine learning
methods including traditional ML algorithms (NB, SVM, LR,
kNN, DT) and three deep learning algorithms (CNN, RNN_LSTM,
RNN_GRU). They also examined the ensemble of the classifier
which was found to exhibit the highest recall of 93.08%. Addition-
ally, they reported that the classification reliability depends on the
vectorization method where word embedding vector space models
seemed to outperform bag-of-words (BOW) method. Such clas-
sification models for separating DB requirements into different
categories, namely, design, construction, and O&M, can assist the
general contractors in extracting the precise scope of a subcontrac-
tor from a lengthy and complex DB contract. The classification
models developed by researchers for structuring contractual text
can assist in improving organization and access to critical infor-
mation provided in a large number of electronic text documents
produced in a construction project. Enabling quick access to es-
sential information through document organization improves the
coordination, collaboration, and information exchange among proj-
ect members to support effective planning and decision making.
It can further protect the contractor from any financial loss and dis-
putes due to the missing information.
NLP-Assisted Detection of Violation with
Construction Laws and Regulations
Another main research theme of NLP approaches to address legal
issues in construction was aimed at automated development of
logic rules from natural language regulatory provisions to support
automated compliance checking (ACC). Table 3 summarizes the
research efforts undertaken that explored the capability of NLP-
based ACC. As shown in the table, the main focus in this area was
on the following topics: automated classification of regulatory pro-
visions, automated information extraction for rules development
from regulatory provisions, and ACC of building information model
(BIMs). The details of developed NLP frameworks in this area of
research are discussed below.
Automated Classification of Regulatory Provisions. The classi-
fication of voluminous sets of unstructured provisions in laws and
regulations is the first step required for ACC platforms. To address
this, Salama and El-Gohary (2013) proposed an ML-based text
classification model for classifying regulatory provisions into four-
teen predefined categories of compliance checking (CC) such as
© ASCE 03121004-7
environmental, health, safety, security, quality, etc. The developed
classifier used NB, SVM, and maximum entropy (ME) algorithms.
The SVM algorithm achieved the highest recall of 100% on their
dataset comprising of 330 regulatory provisions. On the other hand,
NB and ME both reached the same recall of 96% only. To further
classify the environmental regulatory provisions into more detailed
categories, Zhou and El-Gohary (2016b) investigated a different
approach, namely, hierarchical text classification, to classify the
clauses in environmental regulatory codes into 10 different topics
of environmental compliance checking, including air leakage, fen-
estration, lightening power, thermal insulation, etc. The authors used
NB, SVM, kNN, DT, radius-based neighbors (RBN), and random
forest (RF) algorithms to develop classification models. The best
SVM model achieved a recall and precision of 97% and 84%, re-
spectively, when being tested on a dataset of 1200 clauses. Other
algorithms also reported reliable results; however, RBN exhibited
a very low 37.5% recall performance. Another study by Song et al.
(2018) used a deep learning algorithm to classify the regulatory pro-
visions into different categories such as site, building, structure, fa-
cility, evacuation and fireproof, etc. The proposed method applies
the word2vec embedding technique to convert the meaning of words
into numerical values. The classification labels are helpful to know
what type of information is required to be extracted from a provi-
sion. The developed model can also extract the top related words for
any input word in the provision. The advantages of performing text
classification before information extraction is that the irrelevant text
is filtered out and semantically similar provisions are grouped, which
improves the efficiency and accuracy of information extraction and
subsequent CC rules.
Automated Information Extraction for Rules Development
from Regulatory Provisions. In attempt to automate the compli-
ance checking of designed structures against regulatory provisions,
a few studies have developed models for converting natural lan-
guage provisions into computer-understandable rules. Most studies
used rule-based approaches for this purpose. The first model for
information extraction from regulatory provisions to develop CC
rules was proposed by Zhang (2011). The developed model can
automatically extract essential information (i.e., subject, attribute,
comparison, quantity) which are then used to develop logic rules.
The information is extracted by matching patterns produced using
semantic (domain-specific meaning/context-related features) and
syntactic features (nouns, verbs, etc.) of the text. An ontology
and a syntactic parser were used to extract semantic and syntactic
features respectively from text to develop patterns. Their evaluation
results on quantitative requirements of International Building Code
2006 indicated that the use of semantic features (using ontology) to
develop patterns yields better performance than using syntactic
features (using POS tags) since the semantic features could well
understand domain-specific terms and contexts. The syntactic and
semantic features-based information extraction methods reported
an f-measure of 75% and 97.4%, respectively. Following this study,
Zhang and El-Gohary (2016b) developed a more advanced
rule-based information extraction model that utilized dependency
information (i.e., nsubj, dobj, nmod) along with simple syntactic
(i.e., noun, verb, adjective, adverb) and semantic (i.e., domain-
specific meaning/context-related features) features of the text. In
comparison with the previous model, this model can extract more
information from a provision such as subject, subject restriction,
compliance checking attribute, deontic operator indicator, quantita-
tive relation, comparative relation, quantity value, quantity unit, and
quantity restriction. The information extraction rules of the current
study were validated on the 2009 International Building Code,
resulting in a precision and recall of 96.9% and 94.4%, respec-
tively. This approach also produces impressive performance with
J. Constr. Eng. Manage.
© ASCE
Table 3. Summary of studies on NLP-assisted detection of violation with construction laws and regulations
Topic Solutions
Automated classification Classification of regulatory
of regulatory provisions provisions
Environmental code classification
Automated rule checking system
Automated information Information extraction from
extraction for rules building code provisions for rules
development from construction
regulatory provisions
Information extraction from
building code provisions for rules
construction
Extraction of information from
environmental requirements
Information extraction from
fire code provisions for rules
construction
03121004-8
Information extraction from utility
policies
A nonproprietary and
user-understandable representation
of building regulations
ACC of Building Extension of current IFC schema
Information Models
(BIMs)
Development of logic reasoning
system
J. Constr. Eng. Manage.
Approach
ML-based text classification
ML-based hierarchical text
classification
Deep learning-based approach
Pattern matching-based rules using
parsing information, POS tagging,
and ontology
Rule-based information extraction
approach
Rule-based information extraction
methods
Dependency parsing (DP) and
phrase structure grammar (PSG)
methods
Semantic frame-based information
extraction method
Logic-based representation and
tree-based visualization approaches
Pattern-matching-based rules,
ML-based text classification
A combination of semantic NLP
and EXPRESS data-based
technique
Methodology description Performance References
Used ML algorithms to classify general 100% (recall), Salama and
conditions of a contract into fourteen CC 96% (precision) El-Gohary (2013)
categories
Used ML algorithms to perform hierarchical 97% (recall), Zhou and
text classification of environmental 84% (precision) El-Gohary (2016b)
regulatory codes into ten different topics
Converted the meaning of words in numerical N/A Song et al. (2018)
values to classify the topic of sentences
Extracted and represented the semantic 75%-100% (precision), Zhang (2011)
information from building codes in a 75%-95% (recall),
computer-understandable structure to enable 75%–97.4% (F-score)
rules construction
Extracted regulatory information 96.9% (precision), Zhang and
from building codes using syntactic 94.4% (recall) El-Gohary (2016b)
(syntax/grammar-related) and semantic
(meaning/context-related) features
Used rule-based NLP methods to classify 98.1% (recall), Zhou and
and extract information from environmental 98.5% (precision) El-Gohary (2016a)
requirements in contracts
Compared the performance of DP and PSG to 94.3%–96.9% (F-score) Zhang and
extract information from fire codes El-Gohary (2012b)
Used a semantic frame-based information 92.23% (precision) Xu and Cai (2019)
extraction method with a focus on domain
semantics and lexical semantics
Investigated a logic-based representation and text representation >visual Zhang (2017)
tree-based visualization methods representation >logic
representation
Extract concepts from building regulations 88.7%–97.1% (precision), Zhang and
and match the extracted concepts to concepts 94.2%–99.2% (recall), El-Gohary (2016a)
in the IFC class hierarchy to further extend 91.4%–98.1% (F-score)
the schema
Used the NLP and EXPRESS data-based 87.6% (precision), Zhang and
techniques to extract and transform both 98.7% (recall), El-Gohary (2017)
regulatory and design information in BIMs 92.8% (F-score)
into logical format to perform automated
compliance reasoning
a precision of 98.5% and a recall of 98.1%, which is higher than the
96.9% and 94.4% when being tested on a different dataset compris-
ing of environmental regulations of a real construction contract
(Zhou and El-Gohary 2016a). In a separate study, Zhang and
El-Gohary (2012b) made another comparison of performance be-
tween rules developed based on DP and phrase-structure grammar
(PSG). PSG corresponds to a set of phrase structure relations which
are defined by the rules that predict the different combinations of
tokens forming a grammatical phrase. PSG is actually used to pro-
duce phrase tags (QP→JJR IN CD) by using individual POS tags
(JJR, IN, CD). Phrase tags are used to extract information when a
specific combination of POS tags is encountered. When being va-
lidated on the 2009 International Fire Code, DP rules slightly out-
perform PSG rules as their F-measures were reported to be 96.9%
and 94.3%, respectively. A recent study by Xu and Cai (2019) used
dependency parsing and POS tagging along with knowledge bases
such as ontologies and lexicons for entity recognition. In comparison
with the previously discussed rule-based methods, the proposed
method reported a low precision of 92.23% for extracting the regu-
latory information from the Indiana utility accommodation policy.
Another contribution to digital representation of building regulations
was made by Zhang (2017). To enable the nonproprietary and user-
understandable representation of building regulations, the author in-
vestigated a logic-based representation and tree-based visualization
method for building regulatory requirements to improve the under-
standability and reading speed of building regulations. In terms of
understandability and reading speed, the text representation per-
formed better than the visual and logic representation in the exper-
imental study.
ACC of Building Information Models. Another critical task re-
quired for ACC of building information models (BIMs) is the au-
tomatic extraction of CC-related information from BIMs to
integrate machine readable-rules with BIMs. Due to the limited
coverage of CC-related concepts in the existing Industry Founda-
tion Classes (IFC)–based BIM models, a few efforts have been
made to automate the process of extending IFC schemas using
NLP. To address this issue, a new method for extending the IFC
schema was proposed by Zhang and El-Gohary (2016a). The
method utilizes pattern matching-based methods and ML tech-
niques including NB, SVM, kNN, and DT to extract concepts from
regulatory documents and predict their relationship with IFC con-
cepts to extend the schema. Pattern matching–based rules based on
POS tag information are used for concept extraction from codes
which are then matched with the IFC class hierarchy to extract
the most related IFC concepts using WordNet. The ML algorithm
predicts the relationship between the extracted concepts and the
most related IFC concepts which is used to further extend
the IFC schema. The kNN and NB model reported the highest and
lowest precision of 91% and 76.2%, respectively, when evaluated
on International Building Codes 2006 and 2009. Following this
study, Zhang and El-Gohary (2017) also offer a novel system for
fully automated checking of BIMs for compliance with build-
ing regulations. The system comprises three modules of regulatory
information extraction, design information extraction, and com-
pliance reasoning. The first module uses pattern matching-based
rules to extract semantic information elements (subject, compliance
checking attribute, quantity, etc.) from regulatory codes and convert
them into logic rules. In the second module, the EXPRESS data-
based techniques are implemented to transform design information
in BIMs into logic facts. Finally, the compliance of the logic facts
with the logic rules is performed by executing the semantic-based
logic reasoning algorithms in the compliance reasoning module.
The model developed in this study reported an F-score of 92.8%.
In the area of compliance checking, most existing NLP-based
© ASCE 03121004-9
methods were validated on small sets of building codes. Further
research on automated design verification should be expanded to
other domains such as the highway sector and should use larger
samples of codes. Additionally, previous studies have mainly dealt
with prescriptive requirements of which the design constraint can
be presented using the first order-logic rules. However, real work
design codes also include objective requirements that do not explic-
itly specify any quantitative constraint. We know very little about
whether the existing methods perform well on such requirements.
NLP Frameworks for the Analysis of
Historical Legal Cases
Another main focus of the previous studies was centered on the
processing of legal case data. The major NLP frameworks devel-
oped by previous researchers, as summarized in Table 4, were aimed
at addressing the following research problems: analysis of legal
cases data of construction defects and similar case retrieval. NLP
frameworks are highly effective in analyzing the previous case data
to provide important insights to the project participants as well as the
court professionals. The details of the NLP frameworks developed
in this area are discussed below.
Analysis of Legal Cases Data of Construction Defects. To exam-
ine the common types of construction defects resulting in costly
delays and disputes, Jallan et al. (2019) tested the ability of
NLP for analyzing legal cases related to construction defects.
The authors used the frequency analysis of keywords in the historic
construction legal case documents from the LexisNexis database to
identify the common topics. They used the latent Dirichlet alloca-
tion (LDA) method, a modeling method for identifying the topic of
a document, to cluster the documents by topics based on their dis-
tinct keyword features. The study identified 14 unique topics from
the cluster analysis. This developed automated framework can help
project participants to understand better the construction defects
that lead to legal cases in the past. Subsequently, this knowledge
can reveal the root causes of defects to prevent similar issues and
costly litigation in future projects.
Similar Case Retrieval. Several studies have used NLP to enhance
the efficiency and effectiveness of legal case analysis by reviewing
similar cases in a certain legal database. Fan and Li (2013) devel-
oped a framework for retrieving similar cases in a legal case library
given a certain input case. The search results are based on the se-
mantic similarity rather than string similarity between the user’s
input within the case descriptions. In their study, the documents
were vectorized using the bag of word (BOW) method along with
the use of TF-IDF for measuring the term weight. The method was
found to outperform the traditional string-based document search.
It was tested on the Westlaw legal information database with differ-
ent input legal case descriptions and received approximately 40%
precision and 90% recall at the top 90 results. One limitation of this
study is that it did not consider the variation of terms such as syn-
onyms in the input description and the text database. Besides, this
approach also requires the user to have a lengthy description of the
case while searching for information using the key phrases is pref-
erable. To address those drawbacks, Zou et al. (2017) developed a
new keyword-based search algorithm that uses the semantics of
words for legal case retrieval. They used a risk-related domain dic-
tionary as well as the general dictionary WordNet, which helps the
algorithm to improve the search results as the synonyms and other
lexical forms of the input keywords are also used as additional in-
put. The authors tested their method on WorkSafeBC and NIOSH
case datasets with a precision of mostly above 90% and an F-score
varying from 42% to 83% at the top 10 results.
Although similar case retrieval is useful for making an appropri-
ate judgment on new dispute situations, an insightful comparison
J. Constr. Eng. Manage.
 Cavar et al. (2018)
Jallan et al. (2019)

Fan and Li (2013)

Zou et al. (2017)

between dissimilar cases would also be necessary, especially when

References
only a limited number of cases are available. This problem was re-
cently tackled by Cavar et al. (2018), who developed a new method
to support in-depth examination of the difference and contradiction
between legal cases. The authors proposed a deep linguistic NLP
method for constructing the knowledge graph for each of the cases
in a legal document repository. They used graph theories to identify
14 unique topics identified

parts of the case description that differ or overlap with one another.

42.3%–83.3% (F-score)
70%–100% (precision),
These graphs also include a domain vocabulary composed of syn-
50%–100% (recall), onyms and other semantically related terms. This study, however,
Performance

90%–100% (recall)

was not robustly tested due to the lack of gold standard resources
N/A and corpora.

Directions for Future Research

Overview of Future Needs

cases to identify patterns such as topics,

Used NLP to retrieve similar cases for

Model for comparing cases in terms of

similar cases for construction project
Analyze past 10-year historical legal

Utilized NLP techniques to retrieve

By far, many scholars have devoted themselves to enabling a sig-

Methodology description

alternative dispute resolution in

nificant improvement in the analysis and management of textual

legal data in construction by leveraging recent advances in NLP.
similarity and contradiction

However, the status quo regarding this line of research still involves
construction accidents

the following three common limitations. Firstly, the lack of avail-

able domain-specific datasets poses a major challenge for applying
risk management
types of defects

NLP in the construction domain. Due to the application-oriented

nature of research in construction, the collection of domain-specific
datasets is critical for developing and evaluating NLP models, as
well as providing benchmarks for future efforts. However, obtaining
high-quality datasets in construction can be very difficult. Existing
databases for legal cases and documents in the construction domain
are very limited due to privacy data concerns from stakeholders.
semantic query expansion approach
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)

To ensure reliable performance of NLP models, significant effort

Vector space model (VSM) and

partnering with industry organizations in making labeled data

Deep linguistic NLP method

widely available is a pressing need. Second, the performance of

most existing NLP models to address legal issues in construction
Approach

is still inadequate as the contextual information is seldom integrated.

Vector space model

Since legal construction documents consist of unique terminologies

and syntactic patterns, it is difficult for generic NLP models that
proved their effectiveness in other domains to produce equally re-
Table 4. Summary of studies on NLP-based analysis of historical legal cases

liable performance without adapting to the construction domain.

A few recent studies have attempted to address this challenge by
infusing domain knowledge into the NLP models with the help
of semantic models such as ontologies, taxonomies, and lexicons
Automated information retrieval

Automated information retrieval

(Le and Jeong 2017; Lee et al. 2020; Xu and Cai 2019; Zhang
construction-defect litigation

and El-Gohary 2016b). The findings from those efforts showed

Identification of patterns in

an impressive improvement; thus, future studies would need to con-

tinue the use of domain knowledge models to strengthen further the
Solution

applicability of NLP frameworks to the legal context in construc-

from similar cases

from similar cases

Case law analysis

tion. Third, most of the existing methods for addressing construction

legal issues are in the proof-of-concept stage. These studies were
developed and validated based on researcher-labeled data. There
is still a lack of evaluation using real-world scenarios and feedbacks
cases

from construction practitioners.

In addition to the need for enhancing the robustness of the
existing NLP models, future research is encouraged to tackle other
data of construction defects

aspects of legal issues that have not been well investigated. Table 5
Analysis of legal cases

suggests several new research problems that are worth investigating

Similar case retrieval

to support the following tasks: contract drafting, contract review,

contract simplification for ease of reading, impact tracing of changes
in contractual requirements, early compliance checking of design
codes, construction safety violence assessment, and court outcome
Topic

prediction of construction disputes. The description of the potential

future research problems is provided as follows.

© ASCE 03121004-10 J. Constr. Eng. Manage.

© ASCE
Table 5. Suggested future research areas on legal text processing in construction using NLP
Topic
Contract drafting assistance
Automated contract review
Simplification of legal text for ease of
reading
Impact tracing of changes in contractual
requirements
Enabling early compliance checking with
design codes
03121004-11
Construction safety violence assessment
Court outcome prediction of construction
disputes
J. Constr. Eng. Manage.
Research problem
Contract drafting and comprehension
Subcontract scope extraction
Contract clarity and preciseness
Ambiguity in contractual clauses
Administration of owner obligations
Contract language simplification
Requirement changes impact analysis
Precise selection of applicable provisions
from codes
Construction safety violent assessment
Assessment of quality of construction
claims
Proposed solution References
An automated framework to assist in precise contract drafting as Demasco and McCoy (1992), Hamie and
well to facilitate the expansion of the abbreviations for contract Abdul-Malak (2018)
comprehension
Separation of general contraction into small subcontracts indicating Assaad et al. (2020), Hassan and Le (2021)
different disciplines
Automated model to verify the inclusion of sufficient details and Jagannathan and Delhi (2020)
conditions in contracts to prevent litigious behavior
An automated model to predict the litigation proneness of Jagannathan and Delhi (2019)
contractual clauses
A model to extract and classify the owner obligations in standard Abotaleb et al. (2019)
contracts into different categories, including permits, design
documents, reviews, etc.
Replacement of infrequent legal jargons with domain-specific Lin et al. (2009), Saseendran et al. (2020)
common and simpler words to improve the readability of legal texts
Expansions of abbreviations used in contracts to reduce reader’s McCoy and Demasco (1995)
cognitive load spent for remembering abbreviations
An automated text simplification method to simplify the structure Rameezdeen and Rodrigo (2013, 2014),
and language used in contracts Uusitalo et al. (2011)
Development of a model to predict all requirements in a contract Arora et al. (2015), Navon and Isaac (2009),
being impacted by the change in a specific requirement Rameezdeen and Rodrigo (2014)
An automated model to select the correct applicable requirements Altmann and Samani (unpublished report,
from the regulatory design codes to carryout conceptual design 1978), Nedev and
Khan (2011)
Automated analysis of accident inspection reports for Zhang et al. (2019a)
identification of the OSHA citations violated by the contractor to
determine the penalty
Development of a model for identifying similar cases in previous Aletras et al. (2016)
litigation history to predict the outcome of a new legal case at an
early stage
Contract Drafting Assistance
Despite recent advances in the implementation of NLP in control-
ling the quality of contract drafting, writing assistance models for
contract drafting are still an open challenge (Curtotti and McCreath
2011; McCoy and Demasco 1995). The current state of the art in
this regard involves several NLP approaches to the automated de-
tection of writing errors such as ambiguous terminologies, use of
poisonous clauses, or missing clauses (Chakrabarti et al. 2019; Lee
et al. 2019, 2020; Serag et al. 2010). Still, little effort has been paid
to computational methods that can assist contract drafters in select-
ing the right language or structure to phrase clauses. It would be
helpful to examine the ability of NLP in determining the attributes
of high-quality contract documents and effective strategies that can
help the contract writer improve their writing product. NLP meth-
ods such as the sentence COMPANSION technique developed by
Demasco and McCoy (1992) may be adapted to develop a domain-
specific writing assistance method for the drafting of contracts
or other legal documents in construction. The model was devel-
oped by the computer science domain experts for individuals with
language impairments that can generate a well-formed sentence
from a input sequence of uninflected words by the user. The prin-
ciple underpinning their system is the analysis of semantic infor-
mation or how words co-occur in a trained corpus. Furthermore, an
intelligent NLP model that prompts the contract writer with appro-
priate words would allow him/her to select the most appropriate
word choice. As suggested by Garay-Vitoria and Gonzalez-Abascal
(1997), researchers may explore how NLP can learn the sequence
of words and their contexts to predict the most suitable terms.
Moreover, there is a need for an automated or semiautomated
approach to the separation of the main contract into the smaller
subcontracts. Typically, the majority of the construction work (from
80%–90%) is performed by subcontractors (Arditi and Chotibhongs
2005; Mbachu 2008). Therefore, the process of subcontract separa-
tion is often required (Assaad et al. 2020). Each subcontract is typ-
ically responsible for only a small portion; thus, related clauses to a
particular work portion need to be identified and added to the sub-
contract requirements. The missing of any critical requirement as-
sociated with the subcontractor scope can lead to costly disputes
among the contracting parties. Although the NLP models developed
by Hassan et al. (2020) and Hassan and Le (2021) facilitated
subcontract scope extraction, the model is applicable to only three
disciplines in highway projects. Since several subcontractors are
generally involved in large multidisciplinary projects, a more com-
prehensive model that can extract scope associated with any subcon-
tracted task (such as plumbing, electrical, etc.) in any project type
(industrial, commercial, etc.) is still required.
Automated Contract Review
Despite the fact that significant efforts have been made to develop
contract review methods for enhancing the quality of contracts, there
are still significant challenges that require further investigation. For
example, several researchers expressed the need for new contract
review methods capable of detecting dispute-prone clauses in the
contract (Chakrabarti et al. 2019). Specially, future research should
offer effective means for automated identification of contractual
clauses (e.g., penalties, rights, obligations, payments clauses) that
are more likely to lead to disputes (Jagannathan and Delhi 2019).
Data-driven approaches that leverage databases of the legal case
such as LexisNexis would be worth considering. These approaches
require novel NLP models for analyzing the frequency of contract
clauses cited in legal cases. Novel measures of litigation-proneness
would also be in a critical need to address the above challenge.
Additionally, the inclusion of contradictive clauses in a single
© ASCE 03121004-12
contract is a common issue found in construction project contracts
necessitating further effort from the academic community (Mshali
2016; Parvizimosaed 2020). The aforementioned issues in contract
documents can be resolved by developing NLP models using hand-
coded rules (Lee et al. 2019). Although the development of rules is
a time-consuming task, the rule-based approaches yield higher per-
formance than ML-based approaches given the fact that large-sized
datasets are not often available in construction domain (Salama and
El-Gohary 2013).
Furthermore, most previous studies on contract administration
were orientated towards contractor obligations (Caldas et al. 2002;
Hassan and Le 2021). However, owners also have several obliga-
tions in a project, such as making payments, providing site infor-
mation, assistance with permits, work inspection, and reviewing
and approving submittals. Failure to comply with these obliga-
tions unintentionally or intentionally was also reported as the main
source of disputes in construction projects (Abotaleb et al. 2019).
Since the standard form of contracts (e.g., AIA and FIDIC) are in-
creasingly used in construction (Fawzy and El-adaway 2012), re-
searchers are encouraged to leverage NLP to examine highlight the
similarities and differences in the owner’s obligation clauses be-
tween the standard forms. Each type of contract defines different
obligations for the owner. For instance, FIDIC contracts demand
that the owner provide assistance in document preparation only in
obtaining approvals, whereas ConsensusDOCS contracts require
the owner to pay as well to obtain approvals and permits. Further-
more, extraction of the owner obligations from the contracts and
subsequent classification into different categories (e.g., permits, de-
sign documents, review of submittals and requests, etc.) can assist
in the better administration of contracts.
Simplification of Legal Texts for Ease of Reading
Clearly, reading contracts is a key task performed by engineers.
However, legal language is typically not a native language of en-
gineers, causing much difficulty for many engineers when read-
ing legal text (Chong 2012; Rameezdeen and Rajapakse 2007;
Rameezdeen and Rodrigo 2014). Thus, legal contract provisions
should be written in such a way that it can be easier for engineers
to comprehend (Saseendran et al. 2020). In this regard, potential
future research includes using state-of-the-art NLP methods for text
simplification to convert the legal language into an equivalent but
simpler language (Temnikova 2012; Wang et al. 2016). Readability
assessment tools should be developed that can help contract writers
to identify difficult legal terms. Domain-specific methods capable of
replacing infrequent legal jargons with more common and simple
words may improve the ease of reading legal documents for con-
struction engineers. It is worth investigating such a strategy for sim-
plifying construction contracts as it has shown considerable success
in other fields (Dell’Orletta et al. 2015). The use of simpler language
would be extremely helpful, especially for projects in which
the stakeholders are from multiple countries (Foliente 2000; Lin
et al. 2009; Moku et al. 2012). Foreign professionals whose native
language is not English may face great difficulties in understanding
legal documents written in English. Moreover, abbreviations are fre-
quently used in the contracts. Research shows that expanding the
abbreviations used in the natural text can further improve compre-
hension as it reduces the reader’s cognitive load spent for remem-
bering a large number of abbreviations for different words (McCoy
and Demasco 1995). Another text simplification strategy that is
worth investigating is proposing a controlled natural language
for construction project contracts. The use of standardized vocabu-
lary and grammar will help reduce variation in contract writing
styles, thus minimizing reading effort spent on a new contract.
J. Constr. Eng. Manage.
This approach was tested in the industrial sector by Uusitalo et al.
(2011). Given that no similar efforts have been found in construc-
tion, researchers are strongly encouraged to explore such text sim-
plification strategies specifically for construction legal documents.
Impact Tracing of Changes in Contractual
Requirements
Contractual requirements are often changed according to the needs
that evolved during the execution stage (Jallow et al. 2008; Navon
and Isaac 2009; Rendon 2012). Assessing the impact of the changes
made for a specific requirement on other requirements in the con-
tract is essential to maintain the consistency and correctness of
requirements (Rameezdeen and Rodrigo 2014). As shown in the
results of this review, no study was found that assist construction
engineer in tracing the dependencies between requirements. In soft-
ware engineering, efforts have been made to address the similar
requirement tracing using NLP. For example, Arora et al. (2015)
introduced a change impact analysis model for software design
requirements that adopts NLP techniques to identify relevant re-
quirements potentially impacted by a given change in a certain re-
quirement based on the matching phrases between requirements.
Adopting such a phrase-based approach for construction contracts
may be a good research opportunity. The authors of this paper
strongly believe that such a string-based relevance measurement
method should be supplemented with engineering knowledge sour-
ces. Ontologies that model civil engineering rules are necessary to
allow more precise identification of dependent requirements. This is
a challenging problem as construction is well identified as a frag-
mented industry where stakeholders are from different unique en-
tities and use different language.
Enabling Early Compliance with Design Codes
Compliance checking is again a critical measure to avoid legal
issues as it helps to control design errors and ensures the structure
meets all required safety measures to control environmental risks
such as flood, earthquake, etc. (Pritchard 2013). As discussed ear-
lier, researchers have developed plenty of NLP models that trans-
form natural language requirements into machine-readable rules
(Zhang 2011; Zhang and El-Gohary 2012a, 2016b). The benefit
of these techniques in minimizing design errors is inevitable. Still,
there are significant research gaps that are worth investigating.
Existing NLP models for compliance checking assumed that a set
of requirements applicable to the project is given. Thus, they are
only applicable to the later design phase when a complete BIM
model has been developed. Any errors found at this stage will be
costly to fix. In addition, previous studies require a set of require-
ments to be defined, which is hardly available without a tedious
process of reading various voluminous regulatory documentation
to identify what provisions to be included at the beginning of
the design stage. The selection of correct provisions from standards
and codes is critical to control environmental risks involved in a
project (Altmann and Samani, unpublished report, 1978; Nedev
and Khan 2011). However, the standards and codes are often com-
plex documents including a large set of requirements which makes
the selection of applicable requirements a challenging task espe-
cially for young engineers having limited knowledge and experi-
ence (Bulleit 2012). Therefore, more attention should be paid to
explore the capability of NLP to support early conceptual designs.
Developing query frameworks using NLP to assist engineers in de-
termining design provisions applicable to a given type of risk factor
could be an interesting research problem. Such research is expected
© ASCE 03121004-13
to significantly accelerate and improve the quality of the design
process right in the early phase.
Construction Safety Violence Assessment
As showed earlier in the “Results” section, previous studies were
focused on automated compliance checking of design products
against those requirements in codes and standards. No NLP model
has been developed to support compliance checking of the construc-
tion operation. During the construction stage, legal issues often arise
once an accident occurs on the site. Construction operation is typ-
ically governed by various safety standards developed and managed
by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
These regulatory documents mandate the contractors to maintain
safety programs to protect the health and safety of construction
workers (Arditi and Chotibhongs 2005). However, it is quite often
that such safety programs are not complied by contractors, resulting
in many fatalities and serious injuries (Arditi and Chotibhongs
2005). Once that occurs, inspectors are required to develop an in-
spection narrative report, which is then used to determine OSHA
violation citations and corresponding penalties (Nichting 1999;
Treadwell 1971). The need for such an automated method for
retrieving legal articles relevant to the accident description has
emerged as the manual process of identifying such legal references
is time-consuming (Çevikbaş and Köksal 2018). NLP models
that analyze accident inspection reports and retrieve appropriate
references in lengthy OSHA safety standards would greatly
benefit safety inspection officers. To tackle this problem, deep
neural networks such as convolutional neural network (CNN)
were shown to be superior to keyword-based search as reported
by Zhang et al. (2019b) who trained a supervised classification
model using CNN that predict the applicable articles for a criminal
case. Researchers may also examine other traditional ML algo-
rithms and compare them with CNN. However, one well-
known challenge of this end-to-end ML approach may be the lack
of data since such labelled data is hardly available for accident
inpsection reports. Given the fact that OSHA regulations
include a large number of articles, this difficulty should not be
overlooked.
Court Outcome Prediction of Construction Disputes
Construction projects often suffer costly delays due to the
lengthy litigation process (Essex 1996). The loss of time and
money can be prevented if the contracting parties can evaluate
and understand the worth of their claims before taking it to the
costly litigation process (Iyer et al. 2008). This information is cru-
cial for both the contractor and the owner in their negotiation and
dispute resolution. State of the art has overlooked the application of
NLP in this area. There is a need to develop models for predicting
the court outcome for a certain construction claim. Indeed few stud-
ies were found that used NLP for predicting court judgment for hu-
man rights-related cases, for example, the one by Aletras et al.
(2016). They develop a binary classification model using supervised
ML to predict if a case violated or did not violate a human rights
article or regulation. Such models can significantly reduce the fre-
quency of litigation in construction. Given the fact that legal cases
are widely available in legal datasets such as LexisNexis, training a
predictive model on those textual data using ML seems to be a fea-
sible approach. Future research needs to use NLP techniques to ex-
tract valuable data such as types of disputed delays from these
unstructured sources to leverage these data to predict if the outcome
is favorable to a plaintiff. Anticipating the likelihood of success
J. Constr. Eng. Manage.
would help the contractor and the owner avoids a costly litigation
process.
Conclusions
The paper presents an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the art and
the identification of potential future research needs regarding the
use of NLP to reduce legal issues in construction. The review dem-
onstrated that various NLP models, using either human-crafted
rules or machine learning, have been developed that aimed at
processing different types of legal documents including contracts,
regulatory codes, and legal case data. While most research efforts
have been centered on contracts and regulatory texts, legal case data
gained comparatively less attention. Various NLP frameworks have
been developed that can assist engineers in classifying contractual
requirements and detecting risk-prone clauses. In addition, signifi-
cant efforts have been focused on developing computer-readable
rules from natural language design provisions to support the auto-
mated verification of design products. Despite a significant ad-
vancement that has been made in the last decades, the full
potential of NLP for reducing legal conflicts in construction is
yet to be achieved. It is worth noting that none of the current meth-
ods was tested in a real-world context and many studies reported a
low validation accuracy. The main barrier can be attributed to the
lack of high-quality data due to privacy concerns from construction
firms. In addition, the inadequate integration of domain knowledge
bases such as taxonomies and ontologies into generic NLP tech-
niques could made further loss in their performance.
As demonstrated, this critical review has also identified the fol-
lowing key research areas that are worth further investigation. First,
insightful knowledge on contractual language extracted from the
analysis of historical case data should be integrated into computa-
tional tools that can assist contract writers in selecting the right
terms and structure. Additionally, it is necessary to develop new
advanced NLP methods that can make legal texts be more readable
to engineers. Replacing difficult terms with more popular word
choices or shortening complex sentences have been identified as
potential strategies to simplifying legal texts. Finally, research
on automated compliance checking should be expanded from
the design to construction operation context. Researchers may in-
vestigate the capability of NLP in processing construction operation
related documents such as safety accident reports to verify their com-
pliance with national and regional construction standards.
The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, the study
explicitly identified and systematically synthesized legal issues
and appropriate state-of-the-art NLP solutions. This is meaningful
to construction professionals as it helps to enhance their awareness
about the applicability of NLP in tackling a specific problem in the
use of legal documents in construction. Second, this paper is hoped
to increase the robust understanding of the reader about methodo-
logical concerns by generating knowledge from various studies.
This would help to improve researchers’ understanding regarding
the reliability and limitations of different technical approaches. The
study findings can provide guidance for future research in design-
ing suitable research methodology. Finally, this paper contributes to
the body of knowledge by making various recommendations for
future research areas. It is expected that the identified research gaps
would encourage researchers to make continuous contributions in
order to realize the full potential of NLP, particularly in enabling the
ease and effectiveness when dealing with the natural language use in
legal construction documents. Ultimately, successfully filling these
gaps in processing legal documents are expected to make continu-
ous improvement in reducing legal conflicts.
© ASCE 03121004-14
Data Availability Statement
The literature review data generated or used during the study are
available from the corresponding author by request.
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