ConsentCanvas: automatic texturing for improved readability in End-User License Agreements

  • Authors:
  • Oliver Schneider;Alex Garnett

  • Affiliations:
  • University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

  • Venue:
  • HLT-SS '11 Proceedings of the ACL 2011 Student Session
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We present ConsentCanvas, a system which structures and "texturizes" End-User License Agreement (EULA) documents to be more readable. The system aims to help users better understand the terms under which they are providing their informed consent. ConsentCanvas receives unstructured text documents as input and uses unsupervised natural language processing methods to embellish the source document using a linked stylesheet. Unlike similar usable security projects which employ summarization techniques, our system preserves the contents of the source document, minimizing the cognitive and legal burden for both the end user and the licensor. Our system does not require a corpus for training.