Work

JuriFindIT: an Italian legal retrieval dataset

Year: 2026

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Statutory article retrieval (SAR) targets retrieval of legislative provisions relevant to a natural language question.The lexical gap between everyday queries and specialized legal language, as well as the structural dependencies of statute law, makes it a challenging task.Here, we introduce JuriFindIT, the first SAR dataset for the Italian legal domain and the first to explicitly encode cross-article references extracted from national legal code.The dataset covers four macro-areas-civil law, criminal law, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism, and privacy-and includes 895 expert-authored questions and 169,301 generated ones, linked to more than 23,000 statutory articles.We provide retrieval models finetuned on JuriFindIT, proposing a pipeline that integrates dense encoders with a heterogeneous legislative graph, achieving consistent improvements over prior SAR approaches.

Source: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL

DOI: 10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.221

Authors: Niko Dalla Noce, Davide Colla, Sina Farhang Doust, Lorenzo De Mattei, Davide Bacciu

Institution: University of Pisa

Language: English

Topic: Information Retrieval and Search Behavior

Subfield: Information Systems

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: European Commission