Unsupervised Extraction of Workplace Rights and Duties from Collective Bargaining Agreements

Abstract

This paper describes an unsupervised legal document parser which performs a decomposition of labor union contracts into discrete assignments of rights and duties among agents of interest. We use insights from deontic logic applied to modal categories and other linguistic patterns to generate topic-specific measures of relative legal authority. We illustrate the consistency and efficiency of the pipeline by applying it to a large corpus of 35K contracts and validating the resulting outputs.