NOWJ@COLIEE 2026: Adaptive Pipelines for Legal Retrieval and Reasoning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16603v1
• Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2026 02:46:06 GMT
• Title: NOWJ@COLIEE 2026: Adaptive Pipelines for Legal Retrieval and Reasoning
• Abstract summary: This paper presents the methodologies and results of the NOWJ team's participation across all five tasks of the COLIEE 2026 competition.<n>For Task 1 (Legal Case Retrieval), we propose a four-stage candidate filtering, dense retrieval with complementary embedding models, cross-encoder reranking via fine-tuned generative rerankers.<n>For Task 2 (Legal Case Entailment), we combine BM25-based reranking, attention-based reranking, and consensus ensemble verification.<n>For Task 3 (Statute Law Retrieval and Entailment), we adopt a retrieval-aug
• Score: 1.2884266282263097
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: This paper presents the methodologies and results of the NOWJ team's participation across all five tasks of the COLIEE 2026 competition. For Task 1 (Legal Case Retrieval), we propose a four-stage pipeline comprising candidate filtering, dense retrieval with complementary embedding models, cross-encoder reranking via fine-tuned generative rerankers and MLP-based pairwise classification, and adaptive per-query cutoff prediction. For Task 2 (Legal Case Entailment), we combine BM25 filtering, T5-based reranking, and LLM-based entailment verification with consensus ensemble. For Task 3 (Statute Law Retrieval and Entailment), we adopt a retrieval-augmented generation framework with dense retrieval, attention-based reranking, and few-shot-prompted LLM reasoning. For Task 4 (Legal Textual Entailment), we introduce a dynamic routing pipeline that classifies query difficulty and dispatches cases to either a balanced few-shot solver or a structured zero-shot chain-of-thought solver. For the Pilot Task (Legal Judgment Prediction), we combine hierarchical transformers with CRF layers, argument relation mining, and probabilistic argumentation graph reasoning.

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