Papers › Finding the Law: Enhancing Statutory Article Retrieval via Graph Neural Networks

Finding the Law: Enhancing Statutory Article Retrieval via Graph Neural Networks

30 Jan 2023arXiv:2301.12847archive 2025-07-28

Antoine Louis, Gijs Van Dijck, Gerasimos Spanakis

Statutory article retrieval (SAR), the task of retrieving statute law articles relevant to a legal question, is a promising application of legal text processing. In particular, high-quality SAR systems can improve the work efficiency of legal professionals and provide basic legal assistance to citizens in need at no cost. Unlike traditional ad-hoc information retrieval, where each document is considered a complete source of information, SAR deals with texts whose full sense depends on complementary information from the topological organization of statute law. While existing works ignore these domain-specific dependencies, we propose a novel graph-augmented dense statute retriever (G-DSR) model that incorporates the structure of legislation via a graph neural network to improve dense retrieval performance. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms strong retrieval baselines on a real-world expert-annotated SAR dataset.

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Ad-Hoc Information RetrievalArticlesGraph Neural NetworkInformation RetrievalRetrieval

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Graph Neural Network

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