Construction contract risk identification based on knowledge-augmented language models

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. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in revolutionizing natural language processing (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 language models for identifying construction contract risks. The use of 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 provided insights and recommendations for future research.