Papers › A Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset in French
A Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset in French
Antoine Louis, Gerasimos Spanakis
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-the-art 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.
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Code
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Tasks
Datasets
Introduced by this paper, per the archive.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Information Retrieval | BSARD | Two-tower Bi-Encoder (RoBERTa) | Recall@100 | 74.78 | #1 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Information Retrieval | BSARD | Two-tower Bi-Encoder (RoBERTa) | Recall@200 | 78.04 | #1 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Information Retrieval | BSARD | Two-tower Bi-Encoder (RoBERTa) | Recall@500 | 83.39 | #1 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Information Retrieval | BSARD | Siamese Bi-Encoder (RoBERTa) | Recall@100 | 71.63 | #2 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Information Retrieval | BSARD | Siamese Bi-Encoder (RoBERTa) | Recall@200 | 78.38 | #2 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Information Retrieval | BSARD | Siamese Bi-Encoder (RoBERTa) | Recall@500 | 83.77 | #2 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Information Retrieval | BSARD | BM25 | Recall@100 | 51.33 | #3 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Information Retrieval | BSARD | BM25 | Recall@200 | 56.78 | #3 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Information Retrieval | BSARD | BM25 | Recall@500 | 64.71 | #3 of 3 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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