QuALA-NL: Question & Answer with Legal Attribution in Dutch

Romy A.N. van Drie, Roos M. Bakker, Daan L. Di Scala, Maaike de Boer


Abstract
Ensuring trustworthy and traceable outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial in high-stakes domains such as law. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a way to enhance LLMs with domain-specific or updated information and provide attribution to the source, and recent work has focused on knowledge-based RAG (K-RAG) for improved factual grounding. However, proper evaluation of such systems requires high-quality datasets. To address this need, we introduce QuALA-NL: a dataset that provides attributions to legal formalizations, enabling experiments with K-RAG in the legal domain. The dataset contains 101 QA pairs on three Dutch laws, with attributions to the law text and a formalization of the interpretation of the legal text. To demonstrate the capabilities of the dataset, we perform experiments using four configurations: LLM-only, RAG using legal texts, K-RAG using a formalization of the legal texts, and RAG combining both legal texts and the formalizations. The results show that K-RAG has the highest retrieval scores, but that this method is outperformed by text-based RAG on generation. A qualitative analysis shows that the use of the knowledge graph for the generation of answers can be improved. QuALA-NL can be used in future work to experiment with knowledge-based Retrieval Augmented Generation methods.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.49
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
674–684
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-049
DOI:
10.63317/5i9bqybga69e
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Romy A.N. van Drie, Roos M. Bakker, Daan L. Di Scala, and Maaike de Boer. 2026. QuALA-NL: Question & Answer with Legal Attribution in Dutch. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 674–684, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
QuALA-NL: Question & Answer with Legal Attribution in Dutch (van Drie et al., LREC 2026)
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