STARD: A Chinese Statute Retrieval Dataset Derived from Real-life Queries by Non-professionals

Weihang Su, Yiran Hu, Anzhe Xie, Qingyao Ai, Quezi Bing, Ning Zheng, Yun Liu, Weixing Shen, Yiqun Liu


Abstract
Statute retrieval aims to find relevant statutory articles for specific queries. This process is the basis of a wide range of legal applications such as legal advice, automated judicial decisions, legal document drafting, etc. Existing statute retrieval benchmarks emphasize formal and professional queries from sources like bar exams and legal case documents, thereby neglecting non-professional queries from the general public, which often lack precise legal terminology and references. To address this gap, we introduce the STAtute Retrieval Dataset (STARD), a Chinese dataset comprising 1,543 query cases collected from real-world legal consultations and 55,348 candidate statutory articles. Unlike existing statute retrieval datasets, which primarily focus on professional legal queries, STARD captures the complexity and diversity of real queries from the general public. Through a comprehensive evaluation of various retrieval baselines, we reveal that existing retrieval approaches all fall short of these real queries issued by non-professional users. The best method only achieves a Recall@100 of 0.907, suggesting the necessity for further exploration and additional research in this area.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.625
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
10658–10671
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.625
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Cite (ACL):
Weihang Su, Yiran Hu, Anzhe Xie, Qingyao Ai, Quezi Bing, Ning Zheng, Yun Liu, Weixing Shen, and Yiqun Liu. 2024. STARD: A Chinese Statute Retrieval Dataset Derived from Real-life Queries by Non-professionals. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 10658–10671, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
STARD: A Chinese Statute Retrieval Dataset Derived from Real-life Queries by Non-professionals (Su et al., Findings 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.625.pdf
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