Concept labels

Concept labels are the terms which are used for a certain concept when it is shown in a document preview (such as Assemble Document mode). For example:

What is written in the clause	What is shown in the text
1. #Distributor shall supply #product inside #territory.	11.2 The Distributor shall supply the Product inside the Territory.

Clauses created in Clause9 are to a large extent reusable thanks to the concept labels assigned to concepts. If we take the previous example again, this is what the preview could also show to allow for reuse of that clause in an entirely different context:

What is written in the clause	What is shown in the text
1. #Distributor shall supply #product inside #territory.	11.2 The Supplier shall supply the Services inside the European Economic Area.

In the above example, the concept labels for #distributor, #product and #territory were changed from distributor, product and territory to supplier, services and European Economic Area respectively.

Managing concept labels

Concept labels can be freely defined by the user who assembles a document, but in general it is a good idea to provide a small collection of predefined terms for each concept (e.g.: for the concept “contract”, you could provide the following concept labels: “contract”, “agreement”, “master services agreement”, “non-disclosure agreement”, “share purchase agreement”, etc.).

Concept labels are created by either predetermining them under the concept label tab of the concept editor or by assigning them ad hoc in the context of a specific document using the terms pane of the Assemble Document mode.

When filling out a concept label, regardless of whether you do this in the concept editor or in the terms pane of Assemble Document mode, you can provide additional information on certain parameters of that concept label. These parameters work as follows:

• Terminology: under “singular” and “plural”, you can fill out the terms that need to appear if the concept is set to singular or plural respectively. For the concept “tenant”, you can fill out “tenant” as the singular version of the term. ClauseBase will automatically fill out the plural version of the word if it recognises it.

• Gender: you can set references to the concept (e.g.: “he”, “she”, “it”) to be automatically conjugated thanks to Clause9’s intelligent language support. This means that Clause9 can assist you in automatically changing, for example, “he” to “she” or “his” to “her” when switching from a concept label with a male noun to one with a female noun. Clause9 also supports grammatical conjugation based on noun gender for languages where this is relevant, like French and will automatically fill out the gender of a concept label if it recognises it.

• Article: here you can decide the article that should normally appear before the term if no specific article is hardcoded in the Clause9 grammar. By default, this is set to a defined article (“the”), as this is most common.

• Default singular/plural: sets the default way in which this concept label is shown. Usually you will want singular but for some labels, like “Services” or “Parties”, you can use this to automatically be set to plural.

• Capitalisation: determines how capitalisation of concept labels is portrayed. This is particularly useful for concept labels consisting of multiple words.

  • adapt to grammar and styling: follows the predetermined styling set for definitions and how their corresponding terms are displayed.

  • adapt to grammar only: follows (only) the capitalisation used in writing the concept label in the Clause9 grammar, i.e.: #supplier will always result in “supplier”, #Supplier will result in “Supplier” and #SUPPLIER will result in “SUPPLIER”. The predetermined styling set for definitions will be ignored.

  • fixed: sets capitalisation exactly as you filled it out under the “terminology” part of the concept label and will always be shown this way, regardless of document styling settings. A typical use case are brand names, e.g. #clausebase or #Clausebase should always result in “ClauseBase” regardless of the capitalisation used in the concept label itself.

The setting “adapt to grammar only” should only be used in very limited cases as this setting means the concept label will ignore styling settings everywhere.

If you have a need to use a specific type of capitalisation of a concept label in a particular spots, you can always make use of the special functions @lowercase, @uppercase, @capitalize and @capitalize-words.

Note that, instead of defining the singular and plural form of a Concept, it may sometimes be necessary to define two different concepts (one for the singular, and one for the plural).

Possessive form

In English, the possessive term of a concept label is written by adding an apostrophe + s for singular words or s + apostrophe for plural words. There is no need to code this manually in Clause9. Adding apostrophe + s at the end of the relevant concept will make sure Clause9 will output the correct possessive form of the concept label.

E.g. #borrower's will become the Borrower's if the concept is set to singular and will become the Borrowers' if the concept is set to plural.

The same technique will also work for Dutch (i.e. adding apostrophe +s), if slightly different in output due to the difference in grammatical rules.