On Verifiable Legal Reasoning: A Multi-Agent Framework with Formalized Knowledge Representations

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sadowski, Albert, Chudziak, Jarosław A.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Sadowski, Albert
Chudziak, Jarosław A.
author_facet Sadowski, Albert
Chudziak, Jarosław A.
contents Legal reasoning requires both precise interpretation of statutory language and consistent application of complex rules, presenting significant challenges for AI systems. This paper introduces a modular multi-agent framework that decomposes legal reasoning into distinct knowledge acquisition and application stages. In the first stage, specialized agents extract legal concepts and formalize rules to create verifiable intermediate representations of statutes. The second stage applies this knowledge to specific cases through three steps: analyzing queries to map case facts onto the ontology schema, performing symbolic inference to derive logically entailed conclusions, and generating final answers using a programmatic implementation that operationalizes the ontological knowledge. This bridging of natural language understanding with symbolic reasoning provides explicit and verifiable inspection points, significantly enhancing transparency compared to end-to-end approaches. Evaluation on statutory tax calculation tasks demonstrates substantial improvements, with foundational models achieving 76.4\% accuracy compared to 18.8\% baseline performance, effectively narrowing the performance gap between reasoning and foundational models. These findings suggest that modular architectures with formalized knowledge representations can make sophisticated legal reasoning more accessible through computationally efficient models while enhancing consistency and explainability in AI legal reasoning, establishing a foundation for future research into more transparent, trustworthy, and effective AI systems for legal domain.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_00710
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Verifiable Legal Reasoning: A Multi-Agent Framework with Formalized Knowledge Representations
Sadowski, Albert
Chudziak, Jarosław A.
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Legal reasoning requires both precise interpretation of statutory language and consistent application of complex rules, presenting significant challenges for AI systems. This paper introduces a modular multi-agent framework that decomposes legal reasoning into distinct knowledge acquisition and application stages. In the first stage, specialized agents extract legal concepts and formalize rules to create verifiable intermediate representations of statutes. The second stage applies this knowledge to specific cases through three steps: analyzing queries to map case facts onto the ontology schema, performing symbolic inference to derive logically entailed conclusions, and generating final answers using a programmatic implementation that operationalizes the ontological knowledge. This bridging of natural language understanding with symbolic reasoning provides explicit and verifiable inspection points, significantly enhancing transparency compared to end-to-end approaches. Evaluation on statutory tax calculation tasks demonstrates substantial improvements, with foundational models achieving 76.4\% accuracy compared to 18.8\% baseline performance, effectively narrowing the performance gap between reasoning and foundational models. These findings suggest that modular architectures with formalized knowledge representations can make sophisticated legal reasoning more accessible through computationally efficient models while enhancing consistency and explainability in AI legal reasoning, establishing a foundation for future research into more transparent, trustworthy, and effective AI systems for legal domain.
title On Verifiable Legal Reasoning: A Multi-Agent Framework with Formalized Knowledge Representations
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00710