Summary:
An Austrian company develops a system for the automatic information retrieval out of contract documents and the linkage to corresponding business processes. It is looking for companies which are manually dealing with large numbers of similar contracts (supplier, maintenance, service...) in German or English. These shall be used together with the know how in connected business processes in the course of the development. A technical (and subsequent research cooperation: HEU proposal) is envisaged.
Description:
The Austrian company is a renowned software manufacturer and cloud service provider with an innovative portfolio of products and services to simplify, accelerate and improve the quality of document and process management in all business areas. Data protection and data security have top priority.
The company is currently working in a national funded R&D-project together with an Austrian R&D-organisation on the automatic information retrieval out of contract documents and the linkage to corresponding business processes by using artificial intelligence approaches.
The current high-level approach can be described as followed:
For specific contract domains (e.g. maintenance service agreements, supplier contracts, etc.) in a company usually a set of business processes is defined to reflect the business life-cycle of contracts in that domain. A support system will retrieve (via Natural Language Processing) the correct processes for a specific contract out of this predefined process-pool. These processes are presented to the user and enriched with the corresponding metadata (e.g. date of signature, address of contracts partners etc.). The user can then verify this information and forward the processes, with the capsuled metadata, to a workflow engine.
The Austrian company is now looking for larger datasets of similar contracts (contract domains) together with the coresponding know how of connected business processes to apply and test in the course of the current development.
It is therefore searching for companies providing such datasets (supplier, maintenance, service, leasing etc. contracts) and contract and business process know how for a technical cooperation agreement as well as a possible subsequent research cooperation (within a project proposal for Horizon Europe in 2022).
Partners from Germany, Switzerland or Austria are preferred.
Type (e.g. company, R&D institution…), field of industry and Role of Partner Sought:
The Austrian company is looking for middle sized or large companies which are manually dealing with large numbers of similar contracts and want to contribute to the development of an automated decision support and processing system for contracts.
Such companies can be for example:
- mechanical and/or plant engineering companies (large number of maintenance contracts)
- OEMs such as companies from the automotive industry (many supplier agreements)
- facility management companies (large number of service agreements)
- any company with many similar leasing or rental contracts or non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), etc.
Partners from Europe are sought, preferably from Germany, Switzerland or Austria for a:
- technical cooperation agreement: the partner sought is expected to provide suitable datasets of contracts together with know how of contract domains and connected business processes. The Austrian company will provide access to the scientific results of the development. Additionally, a limited period of free use of the existing digital contract management solution of the Austrian company can be considered for the partner.
- possible subsequent research cooperation agreement: integration of the partner in a project application in Horizon Europe, which is planned in summer 2022 (after completion of the national funded development project).
Technical Specification or Expertise Sought:
For application and testing in the current development the following is needed:
- larger datasets of specific contract domains (e.g. maintenance service agreements, supplier contracts etc.); a domain means that all contracts in this domain are very similar and only differ in specified parts;
- a dataset has to contain at least 50 contracts in one contract domain for meaningful pre-annotation
- the contracts must be comprised in German or English.
- the contracts should be available digitally, but do not have to be ready digitised via OCR (optical character recognition).
- know how about the specific contract domain is also required together with
- know how about the business processes reflecting the business life-cycle of contracts in the specific domain
External code:
TRAT20210804001
