Long-Context Long-Form Question Answering for Legal Domain

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Kulkarni, Anagha, Jhaveri, Parin Rajesh, Shrestha, Prasha, Han, Yu Tong, Amini, Reza, Madahian, Behrouz
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866908818402705408
author Kulkarni, Anagha
Jhaveri, Parin Rajesh
Shrestha, Prasha
Han, Yu Tong
Amini, Reza
Madahian, Behrouz
author_facet Kulkarni, Anagha
Jhaveri, Parin Rajesh
Shrestha, Prasha
Han, Yu Tong
Amini, Reza
Madahian, Behrouz
contents Legal documents have complex document layouts involving multiple nested sections, lengthy footnotes and further use specialized linguistic devices like intricate syntax and domain-specific vocabulary to ensure precision and authority. These inherent characteristics of legal documents make question answering challenging, and particularly so when the answer to the question spans several pages (i.e. requires long-context) and is required to be comprehensive (i.e. a long-form answer). In this paper, we address the challenges of long-context question answering in context of long-form answers given the idiosyncrasies of legal documents. We propose a question answering system that can (a) deconstruct domain-specific vocabulary for better retrieval from source documents, (b) parse complex document layouts while isolating sections and footnotes and linking them appropriately, (c) generate comprehensive answers using precise domain-specific vocabulary. We also introduce a coverage metric that classifies the performance into recall-based coverage categories allowing human users to evaluate the recall with ease. We curate a QA dataset by leveraging the expertise of professionals from fields such as law and corporate tax. Through comprehensive experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate the usability and merit of the proposed system.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07190
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Long-Context Long-Form Question Answering for Legal Domain
Kulkarni, Anagha
Jhaveri, Parin Rajesh
Shrestha, Prasha
Han, Yu Tong
Amini, Reza
Madahian, Behrouz
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Legal documents have complex document layouts involving multiple nested sections, lengthy footnotes and further use specialized linguistic devices like intricate syntax and domain-specific vocabulary to ensure precision and authority. These inherent characteristics of legal documents make question answering challenging, and particularly so when the answer to the question spans several pages (i.e. requires long-context) and is required to be comprehensive (i.e. a long-form answer). In this paper, we address the challenges of long-context question answering in context of long-form answers given the idiosyncrasies of legal documents. We propose a question answering system that can (a) deconstruct domain-specific vocabulary for better retrieval from source documents, (b) parse complex document layouts while isolating sections and footnotes and linking them appropriately, (c) generate comprehensive answers using precise domain-specific vocabulary. We also introduce a coverage metric that classifies the performance into recall-based coverage categories allowing human users to evaluate the recall with ease. We curate a QA dataset by leveraging the expertise of professionals from fields such as law and corporate tax. Through comprehensive experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate the usability and merit of the proposed system.
title Long-Context Long-Form Question Answering for Legal Domain
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07190