Semantic Similarity based Clustering of License Excerpts for Improved End-User Interpretation

With the omnipresent availability and use of cloud services, software tools, Web portals or services, legal contracts in the form of license agreements or terms and conditions regulating their use are of paramount importance. Often the textual documents describing these regulations comprise many pages and can not be reasonably assumed to be read and understood by humans. In this work, we describe a method for extracting and clustering relevant parts of such documents, including permissions, obligations, and prohibitions. The clustering is based on semantic similarity employing a distributional semantics approach on large word embeddings database. An evaluation shows that it can significantly improve human comprehension and that improved feature-based clustering has a potential to further reduce the time required for EULA digestion. Our implementation is available as a Web service, which can directly be used to process and prepare legal usage contracts.