Automatic Generation of Smart Contracts from Real-World Contracts in Natural Language

Abstract

Real-world contract texts are in natural languages, and normally suffer from lack of accuracy and are subject to interpretations. Hence, it is difficult to automatically generate smart contracts from real-world contracts for monitoring and enforcement of the execution of real-world contracts. Smart contracts can be viewed as a digital twin of real-world contracts because smart contracts in the digital world have the same objective as their corresponding real-world contracts in natural languages. In this paper, an approach to automatic generation of smart contracts from real-world contracts in a natural language is presented. In this approach, a language, called the Contract Text Markup Language (CTML), is used to facilitate automatic abstraction of the details of the real-world contract and convert them to a marked-up contract, which can be automatically compiled to generate the corresponding smart contract executable code for monitoring and enforcing the execution of the real-world contract. A legal contract in English is used to illustrate this approach. In addition, an online smart contract library is presented to facilitate the applications of this approach.