From Legal Contracts to Formal Specifications: A Progress Report

Smart contracts are software systems that partially automate, monitor and control the execution of legal contracts. The requirements of such systems consist of a formal specification of the legal contract whose execution is to be monitored and controlled. Legal contracts are always available as text expressed in natural language. We have been working on the translation of such text documents into formal specifications. Our translation process consists of four steps that (a) Semantic annotation of text identifying obligations, powers, contracting parties and assets, (b) Identification of relationships among the concepts identified in (a), (c) Generation of a domain model for terms used in the contract, as well as identification of parameters and local variables for the contract, (d) Generation of formal expressions that formalize the constituents of obligations and powers. This paper reports on the status of the project and the results that have been achieved.