KoBLEX: Open Legal Question Answering with Multi-hop Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lee, Jihyung, Kim, Daehui, Hwang, Seonjeong, Kim, Hyounghun, Lee, Gary
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916928140869632
author Lee, Jihyung
Kim, Daehui
Hwang, Seonjeong
Kim, Hyounghun
Lee, Gary
author_facet Lee, Jihyung
Kim, Daehui
Hwang, Seonjeong
Kim, Hyounghun
Lee, Gary
contents Large Language Models (LLM) have achieved remarkable performances in general domains and are now extending into the expert domain of law. Several benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate LLMs' legal capabilities. However, these benchmarks fail to evaluate open-ended and provision-grounded Question Answering (QA). To address this, we introduce a Korean Benchmark for Legal EXplainable QA (KoBLEX), designed to evaluate provision-grounded, multi-hop legal reasoning. KoBLEX includes 226 scenario-based QA instances and their supporting provisions, created using a hybrid LLM-human expert pipeline. We also propose a method called Parametric provision-guided Selection Retrieval (ParSeR), which uses LLM-generated parametric provisions to guide legally grounded and reliable answers. ParSeR facilitates multi-hop reasoning on complex legal questions by generating parametric provisions and employing a three-stage sequential retrieval process. Furthermore, to better evaluate the legal fidelity of the generated answers, we propose Legal Fidelity Evaluation (LF-Eval). LF-Eval is an automatic metric that jointly considers the question, answer, and supporting provisions and shows a high correlation with human judgments. Experimental results show that ParSeR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving the best results across multiple LLMs. Notably, compared to standard retrieval with GPT-4o, ParSeR achieves +37.91 higher F1 and +30.81 higher LF-Eval. Further analyses reveal that ParSeR efficiently delivers consistent performance across reasoning depths, with ablations confirming the effectiveness of ParSeR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_01324
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle KoBLEX: Open Legal Question Answering with Multi-hop Reasoning
Lee, Jihyung
Kim, Daehui
Hwang, Seonjeong
Kim, Hyounghun
Lee, Gary
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLM) have achieved remarkable performances in general domains and are now extending into the expert domain of law. Several benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate LLMs' legal capabilities. However, these benchmarks fail to evaluate open-ended and provision-grounded Question Answering (QA). To address this, we introduce a Korean Benchmark for Legal EXplainable QA (KoBLEX), designed to evaluate provision-grounded, multi-hop legal reasoning. KoBLEX includes 226 scenario-based QA instances and their supporting provisions, created using a hybrid LLM-human expert pipeline. We also propose a method called Parametric provision-guided Selection Retrieval (ParSeR), which uses LLM-generated parametric provisions to guide legally grounded and reliable answers. ParSeR facilitates multi-hop reasoning on complex legal questions by generating parametric provisions and employing a three-stage sequential retrieval process. Furthermore, to better evaluate the legal fidelity of the generated answers, we propose Legal Fidelity Evaluation (LF-Eval). LF-Eval is an automatic metric that jointly considers the question, answer, and supporting provisions and shows a high correlation with human judgments. Experimental results show that ParSeR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving the best results across multiple LLMs. Notably, compared to standard retrieval with GPT-4o, ParSeR achieves +37.91 higher F1 and +30.81 higher LF-Eval. Further analyses reveal that ParSeR efficiently delivers consistent performance across reasoning depths, with ablations confirming the effectiveness of ParSeR.
title KoBLEX: Open Legal Question Answering with Multi-hop Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01324