Algorithms for extracting information from problem-oriented texts on the example of government contracts

Nikitin Petr Vladimirovich ORCID: 0000-0001-8866-5610 PhD in Pedagogy Associate Professor, Department of Data Analysis and Machine Learning, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation 125993, Russia, Moscow, Leningradsky Prospekt, 49, office building 2 pvnikitin@fa.ru Other publications by this author     Gorokhova Rimma Ivanovna PhD in Pedagogy Associate Professor, Department of Data Analysis and Machine Learning, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation 125167, Russia, Moscow, Leningradsky Prospekt, 49 rigorokhova@fa.ru Other publications by this author     Bakhtina Elena Yur'evna PhD in Physics and Mathematics Associate Professor, Moscow Automobile and Road Engineering State Technical University (MADI) 125319, Russia, Moscow, Leningradsky Prospekt, 46 elbakh@gmail.com Other publications by this author     Dolgov Vitalii Igorevich PhD in Physics and Mathematics Associate Professor, Department of Data Analysis and Machine Learning, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation 125319, Russia, Moscow, Leningradsky Prospekt str., 49 vidolgov@fa.ru Other publications by this author

Korovin Dmitrii Igorevich Doctor of Economics Professor, Department of Data Analysis and Machine Learning, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation 125319, Russia, Moscow, Leningradsky Prospekt str., 49 dikorovin@fa.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

The system of state contracts was created to meet the needs of budgetary institutions. It allows departmental organizations to organize for themselves the supply of goods, the performance of works, the provision of services at the expense of budgetary funds and extra-budgetary funds. The modern problem of government orders is their feasibility: not all contractors are able to fulfill their obligations under the contract for various reasons. Digitalization has contributed to the transparency of the process of supporting government contracts: any interested person can get acquainted with all the details of the transaction between a budget institution and a future contractor on the state Internet portal. This allows you to control the targeted use of budget funds, which is no less important from the point of view of budget execution. As part of the execution of the federal law, performers fill out a lot of settlement, estimate and descriptive documentation, which is also freely available on the portal or websites for interaction between customers (government agencies) and performers (contractors, suppliers of goods or services). Such documents characterize the main parameters of any state order, and the text in such documents is problem-oriented. Problem-oriented texts (POT) are a special type of text data containing information about a specific problem or question. In addition, there are other sources of open and accessible unstructured information. The analysis of such sources allows us to obtain new numerical indicators to assess the current state of the contract.

The problem of the execution of government contracts is considered by many experts and researchers from different scientific fields. Most often, this problem is taken into account by economists, since the study of the impact of budget funds on the real economy is relevant. As a rule, for the construction of mathematical and economic models, already known quantitative indicators are used, which are available on the open portal of public procurement. Thus, the researchers in their work ^[1] used all available numerical indicators (on the part of the customer, on the part of the supplier, as well as the parameters of the contract itself), which can affect the risks of non-fulfillment of contracts (shown in Figure 1). But the authors did not take into account the available unstructured information, which can also be expressed in numerical indicators. Therefore, it is necessary to pay special attention to the methods of SWEAT analysis using machine learning.

Figure 1. Formed numerical signs in the work ^[1].

There are a large number of scientific papers and software systems devoted to the use of various methods of analyzing unstructured information in various fields of activity: in civil aviation, in monitoring news and Internet sites, medicine, in text analysis of documents and information search in unstructured sources.

The authors of the article ^[2] analyze the effectiveness of a computer model of language construction in its structuring and formalization, which contributes to the concretization of the meaning of oral and written text in working with large volumes of unstructured textual information. The article describes the basic concepts characterizing the syntactic relations of text messages in English, as well as the specifics of the approach to the analysis of syntactic structures of English-language texts. Using the example of a software product developed by the authors, the sequence of its algorithm implementation is analyzed.

The paper ^[3] discusses the use of natural language processing methods for analyzing large volumes of clinically important information contained in unstructured form in electronic medical records. The article presents examples of successful application of some methods of natural language processing, as well as lists the main problems and limitations of their more effective use for the analysis of unstructured medical data.

Articles ^[4-6] are devoted to the problem of automatic processing of unstructured documents. The volume of such documents is growing every year, and manual processing takes a lot of time and resources. To solve this problem, the general architecture of the information extraction system based on modern approaches of natural language processing and machine learning is presented. The presented solution allows you to process a large amount of unstructured information without writing code and preparing parsing templates.

Taken together, these approaches to analyzing unstructured text take place when investigating the possibility of creating an additional indicator as part of assessing the risk of non-fulfillment of government contracts.

The purpose of the study

The purpose of this study is to study deep machine learning algorithms for analyzing textual information to form an additional indicator for evaluating the execution of government contracts. 

Material and methods of research

In public procurement, standard types of documents are most often used, such as contracts, invoices, any cover letters and appendices. In other words, these are legal documents, and this is another example of POT. They contain legal terms, definitions and rules used to describe legislative procedures, legal processes, legal aspects of transactions, etc. They also contain valuable information about the parameters of the contract itself, which cannot be represented by a numerical indicator without preliminary processing.

In particular, each contract has a section of the draft contract that contains the main parameters:

·                    Names and details of government agencies and suppliers.

·                    Description of works, services or goods.

· Dates and deadlines.

· Amounts and terms of payment.

· Technical specifications and requirements.

·                    Provisions on guarantees and liability.

· Sanctions and fines.

· Details and signatures of the parties to the contract.

Especially important among these characteristics are the description of works, services or goods, technical specifications and requirements, provisions on guarantees and liability, as well as sanctions and fines. Together, these parameters are the target for determining the complexity of the contract, which directly affects the quality of its execution by the contractor. The remaining parameters are no less valuable, but are most often presented as structured information on the public procurement platform itself.

When analyzing problem-oriented texts, there are a number of difficulties: unstructured information does not have a clear structure and may contain a large amount of noise and insignificant data, a fairly large volume of raw texts. Traditional data analysis methods (relational databases and statistical methods) cannot process and extract information from such data. In the context of extracting information from the POT, two fundamental approaches can be considered, which are most often used by researchers and developers in solving this problem: manual definition of rules for text extraction and a statistical method using machine and deep learning algorithms. The advantage of manually drawing up rules is to control the extraction of information, high accuracy, but this method is applicable to small data sets. Therefore, to solve the problem of POT analysis, it is more effective to use natural language processing methods (NLP, text tonality determination), machine learning (ML, compilation of simple clustering and classification models of text data) and neural networks (NN).

During the implementation of NLP processes, both standard algorithms and more complex word processing models may be required. Among these are tokenization of words, normalization of text, marking of parts of speech, lemmatization and stemming, removal of stop words, recognition of named entities. Simple methods can become the foundation for the implementation of complex text processing models, with the help of which numerical indicators and classes can be formulated. Such models can be called the tonality of the text, the definition of the subject of the text, the selection of the main, etc. At the stage of implementation of such models, the use of machine learning and deep learning models using neural networks should be considered. Previously, it was determined that the bulk of text data for government contracts are legal documents, respectively, it makes sense to consider models that are highly effective in analyzing legal POT.

The main tool for extracting the entities of the state contract in this study will be the Natasha library ^[7]. The Natasha Library is a natural language processing tool specifically designed to extract entities from texts, including government contracts.

The main task of Natasha is the automatic recognition and extraction of various entities from the text, including the names of organizations, positions, dates, amounts, deadlines and other important data that are usually contained in government contracts. It works on the basis of training models on large volumes of text data, which allows it to achieve high accuracy and completeness when extracting information from text. The library also provides additional functions, such as category search and text classification, which makes it useful for various natural language processing tasks related to government contracts.

By applying these algorithms and downloading the documents of government contracts, we can extract entities that we will use as features in the training of machine learning models in the future. In our case, the essential features that are not present in the system of the IES of the State Budget are: provisions on guarantees and liability; sanctions and fines.

The application of the described algorithms will complement the basic models for calculating the risk of execution of government contracts in order to increase the accuracy of their forecast and further use on an industrial scale.

Research results and their discussion

As part of the current study, the main methods of extracting useful information from unstructured texts were proposed for consideration. In particular, it was found out that statistical methods of working with text seem to be the most effective for their further application when creating an additional indicator. It should also be taken into account that some methods are not applicable individually: for example, NLP methods allow you to pre-process raw texts, and using ML models on such data will allow you to classify them and determine numerical parameters for the formation of additional indicators. Thus, it is possible to build a formal algorithm for working with POT to obtain numerical characteristic indicators from it and the final indicator of the complexity of the contract. An example of such an algorithm is shown in Fig. 2.

Figure 2. Diagram of the algorithm for working with POT to obtain additional indicators.

Thus, using this algorithm, we add new features to our final dataset that will allow us to track the execution of government contracts in more detail in machine learning models. In particular, the allocation of such entities as provisions on guarantees and liability, sanctions and fines allowed to increase the assessment of the quality of training models in the framework of government contracts compared with the first studies ^[8].

Conclusion

Within the framework of the study, it was possible to study the main methods of working with problem-oriented texts. The methods of natural language processing, machine learning and deep learning are investigated in order to extract numerical indicators from textual information from government contracts. In the future, the current study will be taken as a basis for the implementation of an additional indication tool. The results of the interpretation of problem-oriented texts can be used to optimize the risk assessment model for the execution of a government contract, as well as to increase its accuracy and efficiency. For successful execution of government contracts, it is necessary to have accurate and timely forecasts of contract execution, which will reduce risks and improve the quality of this process.

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