JUÁ -- A Benchmark for Information Retrieval in Brazilian Legal Text Collections

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06098v2
• Date: Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:14:50 GMT
• Title: JUÁ -- A Benchmark for Information Retrieval in Brazilian Legal Text Collections
• Abstract summary: Legal information retrieval in Portuguese remains difficult to evaluate systematically because available datasets differ widely in document type, query style, and relevance definition.<n>We present JU, a public benchmark for Brazilian legal retrieval designed to support more reproducible and comparable evaluation across heterogeneous legal collections.
• Score: 3.6360100966162787
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Legal information retrieval in Portuguese remains difficult to evaluate systematically because available datasets differ widely in document type, query style, and relevance definition. We present JUÁ, a public benchmark for Brazilian legal retrieval designed to support more reproducible and comparable evaluation across heterogeneous legal collections. More broadly, JUÁ is intended not only as a benchmark, but as a continuous evaluation infrastructure for Brazilian legal IR, combining shared protocols, common ranking metrics, fixed splits when applicable, and a public leaderboard. The benchmark covers jurisprudence retrieval as well as broader legislative, regulatory, and question-driven legal search. We evaluate lexical, dense, and BM25-based reranking pipelines, including a domain-adapted Qwen embedding model fine-tuned on JUÁ-aligned supervision. Results show that the benchmark is sufficiently heterogeneous to distinguish retrieval paradigms and reveal substantial cross-dataset trade-offs. Domain adaptation yields its clearest gains on the supervision-aligned JUÁ-Juris subset, while BM25 remains highly competitive on other collections, especially in settings with strong lexical and institutional phrasing cues. Overall, JUÁ provides a practical evaluation framework for studying legal retrieval across multiple Brazilian legal domains under a common benchmark design.

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