Common use of Contrastive Topic Clause in Contracts

Contrastive Topic. The notion of contrastive topic as a category is based upon the semantic relation of contrast of individual nodes to nodes in the preceding context. However, there are several other factors at play. To set apart cases where the decision taken is based only on the contrastive relation of a node to its context, we selected all nodes depending directly on a verb and not governing any other node – in such cases we can be fairly sure that the problems in annotation are not caused by confusion about the syntactic structure. As we can see in line 1 of Table 3, compared to line 10, these cases form about one fourth of all cases of disagreement in the annotation of contrast. Apart from these simple cases we counted also cases with a more complicated structure. We compared dependency edges where the annotation of contrast is shifted – in one annotation the governing node of the edge is marked as contrastive, in another one the depending node is marked as such. The resulting numbers (line 2) might seem low, but the occurrence of such edges in the annotated text is quite rare. In the fourth phase, in which a larger amount of text was annotated, the number of cases where annotators hesitated about the position of contrast in the dependency structure is nevertheless not negligible. As far as the evolvement of annotation of contrastive topic (see line 10) is concerned, we can see that the most important discrepancies were in the first and third phases of annotation, and that they decreased substantially in both teams of annotators. Contrastive topic however still remains a fundamental “debt” of our annotation guidelines.