A Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset in French
Antoine Louis, Gerasimos Spanakis · Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2022
Statutory article retrieval is the task of automatically retrieving law articles relevant to a legal question.While recent advances in natural language processing have sparked considerable interest in many legal tasks, statutory article retrieval remains primarily untouched due to the scarcity of large-scale and high-quality annotated datasets.To address this bottleneck, we introduce the Belgian Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset (BSARD), which consists of 1,100+ French native legal questions labeled by experienced jurists with relevant articles from a corpus of 22,600+ Belgian law articles.Using BSARD, we benchmark several state-of-theart retrieval approaches, including lexical and dense architectures, both in zero-shot and supervised setups.We find that fine-tuned dense retrieval models significantly outperform other systems.Our best performing baseline achieves 74.8% R@100, which is promising for the feasibility of the task and indicates there is still room for improvement.By the specificity of the domain and addressed task, BSARD presents a unique challenge problem for future research on legal information retrieval.Our dataset and source code are publicly available."Should physicians, surgeons, health officers, pharmacists, midwives, and all others who, through their status or profession, be in possession of information confided to them reveal such secrets, they shall be punished with imprisonment of one to three years and a fine of 100 to 1000 euros or one of these penalties only -unless called to testify as a witness in a court of law (or before a parliamentary commission of inquiry) or compelled by a decree or order to divulge the secret."