Long-Context Long-Form Question Answering for Legal Domain

Anagha Kulkarni, Parin Rajesh Jhaveri, Prasha Shrestha, Yu Tong Han, Reza Amini, Behrouz Madahian


Abstract
Legal documents have complex document layouts involving multiple nested sections, lengthy footnotes and further use specialized linguistic devices like intricate syntax and domain-specific vocabulary to ensure precision and authority. These inherent characteristics of legal documents make question answering challenging, and particularly so when the answer to the question spans several pages (i.e. requires long-context) and is required to be comprehensive (i.e. a long-form answer).In this paper, we address the challenges of long-context question answering in context of long-form answers given the idiosyncrasies of legal documents. We propose a question answering system that can (a) deconstruct domain-specific vocabulary for better retrieval from source documents, (b) parse complex document layouts while isolating sections and footnotes and linking them appropriately, (c) generate comprehensive answers using precise domain-specific vocabulary. We also introduce a coverage metric that classifies the performance into recall-based coverage categories allowing human users to evaluate the recall with ease. By leveraging the expertise of professionals from fields such as law and corporate tax, we curate a QA dataset. Through comprehensive experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate the usability and merit of the proposed system.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-industry.54
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Yevgen Matusevych, Gülşen Eryiğit, Nikolaos Aletras
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
728–751
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-industry.54/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anagha Kulkarni, Parin Rajesh Jhaveri, Prasha Shrestha, Yu Tong Han, Reza Amini, and Behrouz Madahian. 2026. Long-Context Long-Form Question Answering for Legal Domain. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track), pages 728–751, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Long-Context Long-Form Question Answering for Legal Domain (Kulkarni et al., EACL 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eacl-industry.54.pdf