Using artificial intelligence to verify document compliance

Organizations of all domains and sizes are actively exploring ways to leverage Artificial intelligence and infuse it into it's business. There are several business challenges in which AI technologies have already made a significant impact to organization's bottom lines; one of these challenges is in the domain of legal document review, processing, and compliance.

Any business that regularly reviews and processes legal documents (e.g. financial services, professional services, legal firms) are inundated with both open contracts and repositories of previously executed agreements, all of which have historically been managed by humans. Though humans may bring the required domain expertise their ability to review dense and lengthy legal agreements is manual, slow, and subject to human error.

Efforts to modernize these operations began with documents being digitized (i.e. contracts either originating as a digital form or being uploaded via .pdf, post-execution). The next opportunity to innovate in the legal document domain now includes processing these digitized documents through AI services to extract key dates, phrases, or contract terms and create rules to identify outliers or point out terms/conditions for further review. As a note, humans are still involved in the document compliance process but further down the value chain where their abilities to reason and leverage their domain expertise is required.

Whether it’s a vendor agreement that must include an arbitration clause, or a loan document requiring specific disclosures, ensuring the presence of these clauses may prove vital in reducing the legal exposure for an organization.  With AI, we can now automate much of the required analysis and due diligence that takes place before a legal agreement is ever signed.

From classical algorithms like cosine similarity to advanced reasoning using large language models (LLMs), Microsoft Azure offers powerful tools that enable AI solutions that can compare documents and validate their contents.  Attached is a link to an Azure AI Document Compliance Proof of Concept-Toolkit.

This repo will help rapidly build AI-powered document compliance proof-of-concepts. It leverages multiple similarity-analysis techniques to verify that legal, financial or other documents include all required clauses—and expose them via a simple REST API.

Key Features of the Document Compliance PoC toolkit:

• Clause Verification - Detect and score the presence of required clauses in any document.
• Multi-Technique Similarity - Compare documents using TF-IDF, cosine similarity over embeddings, and more.
• Modular Architecture - Swap in your preferred NLP models or similarity algorithms with minimal changes.
• Extensible Examples - Sample configs and test documents to help you get started in minutes.

Please note, this repo is in active development, the API and UI are not operational