Automated Identification of Vagueness in the FIDIC Silver Book Conditions of Contract

Date

2022-04-01

Author

Candas, Ali Bedii
Tokdemir, Onur Behzat

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

206
views

0
downloads

Contract conditions are crucial as they outline an agreement between different parties. The semantic terms in contract conditions need to be precisely designated. Where these conditions contain vague meanings, the interpretation of the conditions will vary, especially since the parties of the contract will be differently motivated to pursue their different expectations from it. The vague terms in contract conditions may thus cause a dispute and conflict among the parties that can jeopardize the eventual success of a construction project. The conventional practice of identifying vagueness in construction contract conditions is done manually, which is prone to error, time-consuming, and requires expert involvement. This study develops a methodology to automate the identification of vague terms in construction contract conditions with the sequential application of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques. Morphological and lexical analysis procedures are used to evaluate the corpus data obtained from a widely used typical construction contract published by International Federation of Consulting Engineers (FIDIC). Classifications of contract conditions in the corpus data are searched using several supervised ML techniques to determine the best performing classifier. The results show that the developed methodology reduces time spent on contract review, is reliable with a high level of accuracy in predicting the presence of vagueness, and removes dependence on expert participation in the contract review processes.

Subject Keywords

Vagueness, Natural language processing (NLP), Machine learning (ML), Rule-based, Supervised learning, Conditions of contract, Classification, Contract administration, Contract preparation, CLASSIFICATION, LANGUAGE

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96522

Journal

JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1061/(asce)co.1943-7862.0002254

Collections

Department of Civil Engineering, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Multipurpose semantic analysis of construction text documentation Candaş, Ali Bedii; Tokdemir, Onur Behzat; Department of Civil Engineering (2022-8) Construction contracts are crucial documents as they outline the agreement. In case any vagueness is present in contract sentences, the interpretation of the sentences will vary between different parties of the contract. Such a case would cause a dispute and eventually adversely affect the construction project's success. Additionally, multiple parties that sign the contract and various departments/disciplines within a party need to be aware of the content of these contracts. All these departments review and...
A model for contract evaluation: subcontracting under dynamic deterministic demand environment Özlen, Melih; Erkip, Nesim; Güllü, Refik; Department of Industrial Engineering (2003) This study is about contract evaluation and selection in an environment where there exist two or more parties, namely a producer and one or more outsourcing companies offering different contract options. The producer faces dynamic deterministic demand, which is known at the beginning of the planning horizon, and has to decide on the quantities of production, outsourcing, inventory carrying, and backorder. Among these decisions, the producer has the opportunity of subcontracting from a set of options offered...
Contract Management Behavior and Practices of Turkish Contractors at International Contracts Yiğit, Ma; Birgönül, Mustafa Talat; Dikmen Toker, İrem (null; 2009-05-22) Contract management starts with the contract negotiations and lasts until the end of the contract, and is the process that covers three fundamental functions required to compensate the goals of the project; Relationship Management, Project Delivery, and Administration of the contract. This paper briefly discusses contract management behavior of Turkish construction companies in international projects; factors influencing contractors’ behaviors, key success factors for contract management, company contract m...
Using natural language processing for automated construction contract review during risk assessment at the bidding stage Eken, Görkem; Birgönül, Mustafa Talat; Dikmen Toker, İrem; Department of Civil Engineering (2022-12) Construction sector contains various risks, and construction projects are open to failure due to their nature and the involvement of multiple parties. Contracts are legal documents that are used to define the responsibilities of parties in a project. Risks that are taken by a party are highly related to their positions in the contracts. However, contracts are prepared by clients, and contractors generally do not have enough time to review their responsibilities before preparing their bids. Moreover, contrac...
Automating Coordination Efforts for Reviewing Construction Contracts with Multilabel Text Classification Candas, Ali Bedii; Tokdemir, Onur Behzat (2022-06-01) Construction projects involve multiple company departments and disciplines. The departments follow certain rules in implementing a project, also referred to as requirements in a construction contract. Current administration practices do not show which discipline or department is related to any requirement in the contracts. Thus, all departments need to review contract requirements but typically only from their perspective and with minimal communication with one another. In addition to the tendency of this m...

Citation Formats

A. B. Candas and O. B. Tokdemir, “Automated Identification of Vagueness in the FIDIC Silver Book Conditions of Contract,” JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT, vol. 148, no. 4, pp. 0–0, 2022, Accessed: 00, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96522.