Michelle Menachery
Author directory2026
UCVE: Graph Structured Retrieval for Compliance Validation
Emily Chen | Michelle Menachery | Rahul Nenavath | Himanshu Kumar | Amirfarrokh Iranitalab
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2026
Emily Chen | Michelle Menachery | Rahul Nenavath | Himanshu Kumar | Amirfarrokh Iranitalab
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2026
Structured compliance validation requires determining whether every obligation in a predefined requirement space is satisfied, violated, or unaddressed by a given document. This can be described as a coverage problem that existing retrieval and classification systems, by treating requirements as independent, are not designed to solve. We introduce UCVE, a domain-agnostic framework that represents compliance requirement spaces as a CRG and performs retrieval via spectral reranking over its reinforcement learning-weighted Laplacian. Edges between requirement nodes are learned via reinforcement learning with a traversal reward grounded in violation detection, reshaping the graph’s community structure such that low-pass spectral filtering distinguishes relevant from irrelevant obligation clusters. Evaluating across three compliance domains, UCVE averages 4.3% matched-K recall lift over flat cosine retrieval and consistently outperforms strong retrieval and graph-based baselines.