UK-PRBENCH: A Paragraph-Level Precedent Retrieval Benchmark for United Kingdom Case Law

2026-09-21

AI Summary

该研究针对法律案例检索的精细化需求，构建了UK-PRBench基准，用于英国案例法中段落级别的先例检索，并评估了现有检索模型的效果。

Abstract

Prior case retrieval (PCR) aims to identify precedent cases relevant to a given query case. Existing PCR benchmarks and methods predominantly operate at the document level, treating entire judgments as the unit of relevance. This formulation is suboptimal for legal practitioners, as judgments address multiple legal issues and only a small subset of paragraphs is relevant to a particular query. Addressing this gap, we introduce UK-PRBench, a benchmark for paragraph-level precedent retrieval in UK case law, constructed from judgments obtained from the UK National Archives and covering a broad range of UK courts and tribunals. Furthermore, we evaluate state-of-the-art retrieval models and establish baseline results. Our experiments show that paragraph-level precedent retrieval remains challenging for current retrieval approaches, highlighting substantial room for improvement. UK-PRBench provides a standardised benchmark for evaluating fine-grained precedent retrieval and advancing retrieval systems for the UK legal domain.

Problem

• Prior Case Retrieval
• Paragraph-Level
• UK Case Law
• Benchmark

Innovation

• paragraph-level
• precedent retrieval
• UK case law
• benchmark