Attributed Question Answering for Preconditions in the Dutch Law

Felicia Redelaar, Romy Van Drie, Suzan Verberne, Maaike De Boer


Abstract
In this paper, we address the problem of answering questions about preconditions in the law, e.g. “When can the court terminate the guardianship of a natural person?”. When answering legal questions, it is important to attribute the relevant part of the law; we therefore not only generate answers but also references to law articles. We implement a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) pipeline for long-form answers based on the Dutch law, using several state-of-the-art retrievers and generators. For evaluating our pipeline, we create a dataset containing legal QA pairs with attributions. Our experiments show promising results on our extended version for the automatic evaluation metrics from the Automatic LLMs’ Citation Evaluation (ALCE) Framework and the G-EVAL Framework. Our findings indicate that RAG has significant potential in complex, citation-heavy domains like law, as it helps laymen understand legal preconditions and rights by generating high-quality answers with accurate attributions.
Anthology ID:
2024.nllp-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, FL, USA
Editors:
Nikolaos Aletras, Ilias Chalkidis, Leslie Barrett, Cătălina Goanță, Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro, Gerasimos Spanakis
Venue:
NLLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
154–165
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nllp-1.12
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Felicia Redelaar, Romy Van Drie, Suzan Verberne, and Maaike De Boer. 2024. Attributed Question Answering for Preconditions in the Dutch Law. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2024, pages 154–165, Miami, FL, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Attributed Question Answering for Preconditions in the Dutch Law (Redelaar et al., NLLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nllp-1.12.pdf