Bilingual BSARD: Extending Statutory Article Retrieval to Dutch

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Lotfi, Ehsan, Banar, Nikolay, Yuzbashyan, Nerses, Daelemans, Walter
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866910737575706624
author Lotfi, Ehsan
Banar, Nikolay
Yuzbashyan, Nerses
Daelemans, Walter
author_facet Lotfi, Ehsan
Banar, Nikolay
Yuzbashyan, Nerses
Daelemans, Walter
contents Statutory article retrieval plays a crucial role in making legal information more accessible to both laypeople and legal professionals. Multilingual countries like Belgium present unique challenges for retrieval models due to the need for handling legal issues in multiple languages. Building on the Belgian Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset (BSARD) in French, we introduce the bilingual version of this dataset, bBSARD. The dataset contains parallel Belgian statutory articles in both French and Dutch, along with legal questions from BSARD and their Dutch translation. Using bBSARD, we conduct extensive benchmarking of retrieval models available for Dutch and French. Our benchmarking setup includes lexical models, zero-shot dense models, and fine-tuned small foundation models. Our experiments show that BM25 remains a competitive baseline compared to many zero-shot dense models in both languages. We also observe that while proprietary models outperform open alternatives in the zero-shot setting, they can be matched or surpassed by fine-tuning small language-specific models. Our dataset and evaluation code are publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_07462
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bilingual BSARD: Extending Statutory Article Retrieval to Dutch
Lotfi, Ehsan
Banar, Nikolay
Yuzbashyan, Nerses
Daelemans, Walter
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Statutory article retrieval plays a crucial role in making legal information more accessible to both laypeople and legal professionals. Multilingual countries like Belgium present unique challenges for retrieval models due to the need for handling legal issues in multiple languages. Building on the Belgian Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset (BSARD) in French, we introduce the bilingual version of this dataset, bBSARD. The dataset contains parallel Belgian statutory articles in both French and Dutch, along with legal questions from BSARD and their Dutch translation. Using bBSARD, we conduct extensive benchmarking of retrieval models available for Dutch and French. Our benchmarking setup includes lexical models, zero-shot dense models, and fine-tuned small foundation models. Our experiments show that BM25 remains a competitive baseline compared to many zero-shot dense models in both languages. We also observe that while proprietary models outperform open alternatives in the zero-shot setting, they can be matched or surpassed by fine-tuning small language-specific models. Our dataset and evaluation code are publicly available.
title Bilingual BSARD: Extending Statutory Article Retrieval to Dutch
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07462