  Contract consistency is important in ensuring the legal validity of the
contract. In many scenarios, a contract is written by filling the blanks in a
precompiled form. Due to carelessness, two blanks that should be filled with
the same (or different)content may be incorrectly filled with different (or
same) content. This will result in the issue of contract inconsistencies, which
may severely impair the legal validity of the contract. Traditional methods to
address this issue mainly rely on manual contract review, which is
labor-intensive and costly. In this work, we formulate a novel Contract
Inconsistency Checking (CIC) problem, and design an end-to-end framework,
called Pair-wise Blank Resolution (PBR), to solve the CIC problem with high
accuracy. Our PBR model contains a novel BlankCoder to address the challenge of
modeling meaningless blanks. BlankCoder adopts a two-stage attention mechanism
that adequately associates a meaningless blank with its relevant descriptions
while avoiding the incorporation of irrelevant context words. Experiments
conducted on real-world datasets show the promising performance of our method
with a balanced accuracy of 94.05% and an F1 score of 90.90% in the CIC
problem.
