Legal contracts govern much of our society, but their specialized language is difficult for non-experts to read. While AI has enabled simplification of complex language, legal contracts pose unique challenges because of their connection to readers' values, ambiguity, and legally binding nature. Based on a formative study (N=20) using Terms of Service (ToS) as example contracts to study challenges in contract reading, we developed TermSight, an intelligent reading interface to probe the opportunities and challenges of designing augmentations for legal text. TermSight guides readers to relevant clauses with color-coded plain-language snippets of information and contextualizes ambiguous language with definitions and hypothetical scenarios. Importantly, TermSight's features always foreground the original, legally-binding contract text (e.g., linking to associated clauses). Our within-subjects study (N=20) demonstrated the opportunities of TermSight in making ToS significantly easier to read and navigate while revealing the challenges of augmenting service contracts such as ToS.

翻译：法律合同规范着我们社会的大部分活动，但其专业化的语言对于非专业人士而言难以阅读。尽管人工智能已能简化复杂语言，但法律合同因其与读者价值观的关联性、模糊性以及法律约束力而带来独特挑战。基于一项以服务协议（ToS）作为示例合同来研究合同阅读难点的形成性研究（N=20），我们开发了TermSight——一个用于探索法律文本增强设计机遇与挑战的智能阅读界面。TermSight通过颜色编码的通俗信息片段引导读者定位相关条款，并借助定义和假设性场景阐释模糊语言。重要的是，TermSight的功能始终将具有法律约束力的原始合同文本置于前台（例如链接至相关条款）。我们的受试者内研究（N=20）证明了TermSight在显著提升ToS可读性与导航性方面的潜力，同时揭示了增强服务协议（如ToS）所面临的挑战。