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Retrieving the Right Law: Enhancing Legal Search with Style Translation

Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Legal question answering requires accurate retrieval of relevant laws, yet the significant writing style gap between user queries and legal provisions poses a major challenge. Existing datasets and retrieval methods often struggle to capture the complexity of legal language, limiting retrieval effectiveness. In this study, we introduce the Legal Query-to-Provision Retrieval (LQPR) task and construct Query2Provision (Q2P), a dataset designed to enhance law retrieval by incorporating diverse case scenarios and linguistic structures representative of real-world legal inquiries. To address the style disparity, we propose a style translation approach that transforms informal user queries into a more formal legal tone and simplifies complex legal provisions for better alignment. Our experiments demonstrate that integrating writing style transformation significantly improves retrieval performance. The dataset is available at https://github.com/ntunlplab/Query2Provision
Authors: Szu-Ju Chen, Jing Jin, Sheng-Lun Wei, Chien-Hung Chen, Hsin-Hsi Chen
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4412378285
FWCI:
Cites: 7
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Related to: 10