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arXiv AI By Zarah Shibli, Areej Alhothali, Lulwah Alharigy

Statutory Article Retrieval from Arabic Judicial Narratives: Family Law and Law of Evidence in Saudi Arabia

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The paper presents a benchmark of 200 synthetic Saudi Arabic judicial cases and 381 statutory articles from Family Law and the Law of Evidence, evaluating various retrieval methods. It compares word‑level and char‑4 BM25, zero‑shot dense encoders, per‑law retrieval, dense‑sparse reciprocal rank fusion, and a novel Decompose‑and‑Refine (DaR) pipeline that splits narratives into legal issues and generates multiple retrieval channels. The DaR approach significantly improves retrieval performance, raising MRR@10 from 0.087 to 0.696 for Evidence and from 0.849 to 0.864 for Family Law, achieving the best results across both domains. whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that decomposing Arabic judicial narratives into legal issues and using targeted retrieval channels can markedly enhance statutory article retrieval, addressing the narrative‑to‑rule abstraction gap in Arabic legal contexts."

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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