Boosting legal case retrieval by query content selection with large language models
Legal case retrieval, which aims to retrieve relevant cases to a given query case, benefits judgment justice and attracts increasing attention. Unlike generic retrieval queries, legal case queries are typically long and the definition of relevance is closely related to legal-specific elements. Therefore, legal case queries may suffer from noise and sparsity of salient content, which hinders retrieval models from perceiving correct information in a query. While previous studies have paid attention to improving retrieval models and understanding relevance judgments, we focus on enhancing legal case retrieval by utilizing the salient content in legal case queries. We first annotate the salient content in queries manually and investigate how sparse and dense retrieval models attend to those content. Then we experiment with various query content selection methods utilizing large language models (LLMs) to extract or summarize salient content and incorporate it into the retrieval models. Experimental results show that reformulating long queries using LLMs improves the performance of both sparse and dense models in legal case retrieval.
Code (1)
Tasks
RetrievalMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
LegalSearchLM: Rethinking Legal Case Retrieval as Legal Elements Generation
Legal Case Retrieval (LCR), which retrieves relevant cases from a query case, is a fundamental task for legal professionals in research and decision-making. However, existing studies on LCR face two major limitations. Fi…
RetrievalLeCoPCR: Legal Concept-guided Prior Case Retrieval for European Court of Human Rights cases
Prior case retrieval (PCR) is crucial for legal practitioners to find relevant precedent cases given the facts of a query case. Existing approaches often overlook the underlying semantic intent in determining relevance w…
DiversityRetrievalSearching for Legal Documents at Paragraph Level: Automating Label Generation and Use of an Extended Attention Mask for Boosting Neural Models of Semantic Similarity
Searching for legal documents is a specialized Information Retrieval task that is relevant for expert users (lawyers and their assistants) and for non-expert users. By searching previous court decisions (cases), a user c…
Information RetrievalLegal ReasoningRetrievalSemantic Similarity+1LegalPincite: Multi-level Legal Information Retrieval Dataset
A common task in legal Information Retrieval (IR) is to find relevant legal sources from case-law collections. While legal practice often requires pinpoint citations (pincites) to specific case paragraphs, most existing …
Information RetrievalInvestigating the Influence of Legal Case Retrieval Systems on Users' Decision Process
Given a specific query case, legal case retrieval systems aim to retrieve a set of case documents relevant to the case at hand. Previous studies on user behavior analysis have shown that information retrieval (IR) system…
Decision MakingInformation RetrievalRetrieval