Unsupervised Extraction of Workplace Rights and Duties from Collective Bargaining Agreements

This is the (partial) code base for our paper Unsupervised Extraction of Workplace Rights and Duties from Collective Bargaining Agreements. For questions regarding the code base, please contact [email protected].

The code base covers:

• Parsing articles
• Computing Authority Scores on statement level

The code base does not cover:

• Splitting Contracts into articles (we developed a customized solution for converting PDFs to text and splitting labor union contracts which is domain specific and does not translate well to other contracts)
• Parallelized parsing (the computational bottleneck for large collections is spaCy dependency parsing. We computed this in parallel using linux command line tools and 96 machines)
• Aggregating authority scores (we aggregated on contract level, but this depends on the specific use case)
• Our analysis which is also heavily customized for Canadian Union Contracts and does not necessarily translate well to other domain (e.g. clustering on article headers and training LDA)

Installation

Assuming Anaconda and linux, the environment can be installed with the following command:

conda create -n labor-contracts python=3.6
conda activate labor-contracts
pip install -r requirements.txt

Installing spaCy and linking with neuralcoref

Installing spaCy and linking with neuralcoref does not work out of the box on linux, the following steps eventually worked

git clone https://github.com/huggingface/neuralcoref.git
cd neuralcoref
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e .
pip install spacy==2.3.2
python -m spacy download en

Run the pipeline

Input to the pipeline is a directory containing each contract as a json file. Each contract should already be split into "articles", and contain a contract_id.

Output will be stored in output_directory, the main output there is the file 04_auth.pkl. For each subject-verb tuple, it contains a boolean value whether it is an entitlement, obligation etc. and saves the "role" of the subject (worker, firm etc.). These results can then be aggregated at any desired level. Intermediate pipeline steps will get saved as well in the output directory.

input_directory="path/to/directory/with/contracts"
output_directory="authority_measures"
python src/pipeline.py --input_directory $input_directory --output_directory $output_directory

What probably needs to be customized for other contract collections

• Data loading (which is customized). Overwrite the function articles_as_strlist in src/main02_parse_articles.py, should return a list where each entry is a tuple (text, {"contract_id": idx, "article_num": article_num})
• We were interested in very specific roles, e.g. worker, firm etc. This is simply a dictionary lookup of the subject of a clause, e.g. following words are considered to be worker: worker="employee,worker,staff,teacher,nurse,mechanic,operator,steward,personnel" Overwrite these for customized applications in the file main04_compute_auth.py