Predicting potentially abusive clauses in Chilean terms of services with natural language processing

This study addresses the growing concern about the inclusion of abusive clauses in consumer contracts, exacerbated by the proliferation of online services with complex Terms of Service that are rarely read. Even though research on automatic analysis methods is conducted, the difficulty of detecting such clauses is aggravated by the general focus on English-language Machine Learning approaches and on major jurisdictions, such as the European Union. We introduce a new methodology and a substantial Spanish-language dataset addressing this gap. We propose a novel annotation scheme with four categories and 20 classes and apply it to 50 online Terms of Service used in Chile. Our evaluation of transformer-based models highlights how factors like language- and/or domain-specific pre-training, few-shot sample size, and model architecture affect the detection and classification of potentially abusive clauses. Results show a large variability in performance for the different tasks and models, with the highest macro-F1 scores for the detection task ranging from 79% to 89% and micro-F1 scores up to 96%, while macro-F1 scores for the classification task range from 60% to 70% and micro-F1 scores from 64% to 80%. Notably, this is the first Spanish-language multi-label classification dataset for legal clauses, applying Chilean law and offering a comprehensive evaluation of Spanish-language models in the legal domain. Our work lays the ground for future research in method development for rarely considered legal analysis and potentially leads to practical applications to support consumers in Chile and Latin America as a whole.