A Compliance Checking Framework Based on Retrieval Augmented Generation

Jingyun Sun, Zhongze Luo, Yang Li


Abstract
The text-based compliance checking aims to verify whether a company’s business processes comply with laws, regulations, and industry standards using NLP techniques. Existing methods can be divided into two categories: Logic-based methods offer the advantage of precise and reliable reasoning processes but lack flexibility. Semantic embedding methods are more generalizable; however, they may lose structured information and lack logical coherence. To combine the strengths of both approaches, we propose a compliance checking framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This framework includes a static layer for storing factual knowledge, a dynamic layer for storing regulatory and business process information, and a computational layer for retrieval and reasoning. We employ an eventic graph to structurally describe regulatory information as we recognize that the knowledge in regulatory documents is centered not on entities but on actions and states. We conducted experiments on Chinese and English compliance checking datasets. The results demonstrate that our framework consistently achieves state-of-the-art results across various scenarios, surpassing other baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.178
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2603–2615
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.178/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jingyun Sun, Zhongze Luo, and Yang Li. 2025. A Compliance Checking Framework Based on Retrieval Augmented Generation. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2603–2615, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Compliance Checking Framework Based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (Sun et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.178.pdf