Chunking German Legal Code

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19806v1
• Date: Tue, 19 May 2026 13:04:58 GMT
• Title: Chunking German Legal Code
• Abstract summary: We implement and compare a range of segmentation approaches, including structural units (sections, subsections, sentences, propositions), fixed-size windows, contextual chunking, semantic clustering, Lumber-style chunking, and RAPTOR-based hierarchical retrieval.<n>All methods are evaluated on a legal question-answering dataset with section-level gold labels, measuring recall, query latency, index build time, and storage requirements.<n>Results show that chunking strategies aligned with the inherent legal structure - particularly section and subsection - based retrieval-achieve the highest recall, while more complex approaches that override this structure perform worse.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: This paper investigates chunking strategies for retrieval-augmented generation on German statutory law, using the German Civil Code as a structured benchmark corpus. We implement and compare a range of segmentation approaches, including structural units (sections, subsections, sentences, propositions), fixed-size windows, contextual chunking, semantic clustering, Lumber-style chunking, and RAPTOR-based hierarchical retrieval. All methods are evaluated on a legal question-answering dataset with section-level gold labels, measuring recall, query latency, index build time, and storage requirements. Results show that chunking strategies aligned with the inherent legal structure - particularly section and subsection - based retrieval-achieve the highest recall, while more complex approaches that override this structure perform worse. These simpler methods also offer favorable computational efficiency compared to LLM-intensive techniques such as contextual chunking, RAPTOR, and Lumber. The findings highlight a key trade-off between semantic enrichment and operational cost, and demonstrate that preserving domain-specific structure is critical for effective legal information retrieval.

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