@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-glier,
title = "{GLIER}: Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking for Legal Case Retrieval",
author = "Li, Minghan and
Lv, Tianrui and
Zhang, Chao and
Zhou, Guodong",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1364/",
pages = "29561--29572",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "The semantic gap between colloquial user queries and professional legal documents presents a fundamental challenge in Legal Case Retrieval (LCR). Existing dense retrieval methods typically treat LCR as a black-box semantic matching process, neglecting the explicit juridical logic that underpins legal relevance. To address this, we propose GLIER (Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking), a framework that reformulates retrieval as an inference process over latent legal variables. GLIER decomposes the task into two interpretability-driven stages: (1) A Joint Generative Inference module that translates raw queries into latent legal indicators (Charges and Legal Elements), employing a unified sequence-to-sequence strategy where charges and elements are generated jointly to enforce logical consistency; and (2) A Multi-View Evidence Fusion mechanism that aggregates generative confidence with structural and lexical signals for precise ranking. Extensive experiments on LeCaRD and LeCaRDv2 demonstrate that GLIER outperforms strong baselines like SAILER and KELLER. Notably, our framework exhibits exceptional data efficiency, maintaining robust performance even when trained with only 10{\%} of the data."
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<abstract>The semantic gap between colloquial user queries and professional legal documents presents a fundamental challenge in Legal Case Retrieval (LCR). Existing dense retrieval methods typically treat LCR as a black-box semantic matching process, neglecting the explicit juridical logic that underpins legal relevance. To address this, we propose GLIER (Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking), a framework that reformulates retrieval as an inference process over latent legal variables. GLIER decomposes the task into two interpretability-driven stages: (1) A Joint Generative Inference module that translates raw queries into latent legal indicators (Charges and Legal Elements), employing a unified sequence-to-sequence strategy where charges and elements are generated jointly to enforce logical consistency; and (2) A Multi-View Evidence Fusion mechanism that aggregates generative confidence with structural and lexical signals for precise ranking. Extensive experiments on LeCaRD and LeCaRDv2 demonstrate that GLIER outperforms strong baselines like SAILER and KELLER. Notably, our framework exhibits exceptional data efficiency, maintaining robust performance even when trained with only 10% of the data.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T GLIER: Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking for Legal Case Retrieval
%A Li, Minghan
%A Lv, Tianrui
%A Zhang, Chao
%A Zhou, Guodong
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F li-etal-2026-glier
%X The semantic gap between colloquial user queries and professional legal documents presents a fundamental challenge in Legal Case Retrieval (LCR). Existing dense retrieval methods typically treat LCR as a black-box semantic matching process, neglecting the explicit juridical logic that underpins legal relevance. To address this, we propose GLIER (Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking), a framework that reformulates retrieval as an inference process over latent legal variables. GLIER decomposes the task into two interpretability-driven stages: (1) A Joint Generative Inference module that translates raw queries into latent legal indicators (Charges and Legal Elements), employing a unified sequence-to-sequence strategy where charges and elements are generated jointly to enforce logical consistency; and (2) A Multi-View Evidence Fusion mechanism that aggregates generative confidence with structural and lexical signals for precise ranking. Extensive experiments on LeCaRD and LeCaRDv2 demonstrate that GLIER outperforms strong baselines like SAILER and KELLER. Notably, our framework exhibits exceptional data efficiency, maintaining robust performance even when trained with only 10% of the data.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1364/
%P 29561-29572
Markdown (Informal)
[GLIER: Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking for Legal Case Retrieval](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1364/) (Li et al., ACL 2026)
ACL