Construction contract risk identification based on knowledge-augmented language model

Abstract: Contract review is an essential step in construction projects to prevent potential losses. However, the current methods for reviewing construction contracts lack effectiveness and reliability, leading to time-consuming and error-prone processes. While LLMs have shown promise in revolutionizing NLP tasks, they struggle with domain-specific knowledge and addressing specialized issues. This paper presents a novel approach that leverages LLMs with construction contract knowledge to emulate the process of contract review by human experts. Our tuning-free approach incorporates construction contract domain knowledge to enhance LLMs for identifying construction contract risks. The use of a natural language when building the domain knowledge base facilitates practical implementation. We evaluated our method on real construction contracts and achieved solid performance. Additionally, we investigated how LLMs employ logical thinking during the task and provide insights and recommendations for future research.