Material Contracts Corpus

Welcome to the Material Contracts Corpus

This website provides free access to the Material Contracts Corpus, a dataset compiled by Pierce Kelaita, Peter Adelson, and Prof. Julian Nyarko. The corpus includes exhibits filed as “material contracts” with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), obtained through the publicly available SEC EDGAR database. The dataset is automatically updated quarterly.

What the Corpus Contains

  • Contracts: material agreements filed as SEC exhibits, each retaining a link to its original filing on EDGAR.
  • Metadata: accompanying each contract is metadata such as the filer, form type, filing date, exhibit type, its machine-identified contracting parties, and a machine-generated contract label, which is our novel contribution. Parties and labels are largely generated using machine-learning models and may contain inaccuracies.

How to Use the Dataset

  • Search: Search and filter the corpus by metadata such as year, quarter, file type, contract label, and so on to generate a subset of the corpus. You can also search for specific text within contracts using the "document text" box. For any given search, you can view up to the first 100,000 matching contracts in the browser in the "matching contracts" table.
  • Download: Use the "prepare download" button to download either the entire corpus, or a subset of it that matches your search criteria. Once your download is prepared, you can choose to either download the full archive (which includes contracts, metadata, and optionally referenced images) or metadata only. Metadata is available in either Comma-Separated Values (CSV) or Apache Parquet format, and contains links to the original contracts online.

Citation & Documentation

The following preprint describes the corpus in more detail and should be cited if the corpus is used:

Adelson, Peter, and Nyarko, Julian. The Material Contract Corpus. arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.02864, 2025.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02864

The dataset's codebook, which documents its metadata in detail, is available for download here.

License & Commercial Use

The Material Contracts Corpus is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), which permits non-commercial use with attribution.

If you are interested in using the corpus for commercial purposes, please contact jnyarko@law.stanford.edu.