International Finance
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ABBYY is untangling the complexities of contractual language

ABBYY, contractual language, Documentum, HP, M-Files, Laser Fiche, Sharp, Canon, Epson, Fujitsu, Konica Minolta, Panasonic Communications, Toshiba, Xerox, ABBYY Text Analytics for Contracts
Text Analytics for Contracts is creating new dynamics for information-heavy documents—but what are the challenges and benefits that this technology could bring to enterprises?

As a global provider of content intelligence solutions and services, ABBYY helps companies transform vast volumes of information into actionable intelligence. The firm provides intelligent capture to help organisations drive innovation by providing meaningful insights, data, and relationships to ultimately improve business outcomes. In general, they offer a complete range of AI-based technologies and solutions to transform documents and content into business value.

The company works with thousands of organisations globally and more than 50 million people from over 200 countries and regions.  They work with a number of content management vendors, including EMC2/Documentum, HP, M-Files, Laser Fiche and scanner manufacturers such as Sharp, Canon, Epson, Fujitsu, Konica Minolta, Panasonic Communications, Toshiba and Xerox.

Paul Goodenough, Head of Enterprise UK at ABBYY, spells out the technology’s core intelligence in processing data and deciphering contractual language for business proceedings, in conversation with International Finance.

How business-intuitive is the technology when interacting with data?  

The technology can detect the relationship between entities within contracts, such as who the seller or the buyer is. It uses semantic analysis to ensure a high accuracy rate of entities, facts and events, and natural language processing to help understand and identify the relationships between the three.

By extracting key facts and events from content such as email, documents, and faxes, businesses can quickly monitor for red flags or misuse. It can also be used to identify and manage commitments and obligations and to help manage risk.

How does the technology help businesses reduce turnaround time?

There are several key areas where text analytics for contracts can reduce turnaround times:

  • Scanning and digitising contracts enables organisations to extract relevant metadata, contract clauses accelerate the contract review process
  • Once contracts are scanned and digitised the contractual meta data and documents may be indexed and also retrieved in a timely fashion
  • Using section based natural language processing, contract clauses can be identified and isolated to make legal review easier
  • Improved control of all contracts throughout their entire life cycle including retention and enforcement policies, which enables staff to meet document production and preservation requirements in a timely and cost-effective way

How scalable is the technology in terms of flexible deployment and confidentiality?

The technology is a cloud-based Solution-as-a-Service solution that enables organisations to provide for resources as their requirements dictate. It can accommodate multiple projects and is both modular and scalable so that it can support multiple tasks and document volumes.  For review and analysis, companies can utilise their own personnel or service partners. For those organisations that lack internal support, ABBYY provides Text Analytics for Contracts as a complete managed service. This added resource allow organisations without sufficient legal, compliance, contracting or procurement capacity to take advantage of the technological capabilities to accelerate their time-to-value.

Since the launch, what has been your clients’ feedback?

Since the launch of ABBYY Text Analytics for Contracts in April 2018, we are involved in a number of implementations along with our partners and while we can’t share specific details, the feedback thus far has been hugely positive.  It’s also been encouraging to see and hear the positive feedback from the product demonstrations – and customers seem to really see the business value of this software.

You can read more about the technology on our digital edition.

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