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IntLawNER: A Named Entity Recognition Dataset and Benchmark in International Law

Summary

Researchers introduce IntLawNER, a named entity recognition dataset and benchmark for codified international law, with 2,987 gold-annotated sentences and 8,094 entity spans from ICJ decisions, UN Security Council resolutions, and ECtHR judgments. The paper also exposes pitfalls in silver-to-gold evaluation and benchmarks models including GLiNER and several LLMs.

SourcearXiv AIAuthor: Genis Skura, Roland Bouffanais, Didier Wernli
IntLawNER: A Named Entity Recognition Dataset and Benchmark in International Law
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[Submitted on 18 Sep 2026]

Title:IntLawNER: A Named Entity Recognition Dataset and Benchmark in International Law

View a PDF of the paper titled IntLawNER: A Named Entity Recognition Dataset and Benchmark in International Law, by Genis Skura and Roland Bouffanais and Didier Wernli

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Abstract:International law provides the normative framework through which states coordinate action, regulate armed conflict, and protect human rights, yet its texts remain without token-level named entity recognition (NER) resources. We introduce IntLawNER, a NER dataset and benchmark for codified sources of international law, covering 2,987 gold-annotated sentences and 8,094 entity spans from International Court of Justice (ICJ) decisions, UN Security Council resolutions, and European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments, annotated with seven institution-specific entity types. We construct IntLawNER with a cost-effective hybrid algorithmic-agentic pipeline that reduces 468k source sentences to a compact annotation set through candidate retrieval, LLM-based vetting, and human review, with 89.6% of gold spans accepted unchanged from the silver layer. However, the silver-to-gold analysis reveals that human-machine aggregate agreement metrics can be misleading in domain-specific NER: Cohen's kappa=0.964 on boundary-matched spans masks a macro-F1 of 0.753 when missing entities, boundary errors, and label corrections are included. The benchmark shows that zero-shot span-based GLiNER collapses on entity types dependent on institutional function rather than surface form (0.243 micro-F1), while fine-tuned transformers struggle on rare labels. Carefully selected few-shot examples that demonstrate label contrasts improve every LLM over zero-shot prompting, with Claude Opus 4.6 reaching the best score of 0.873 micro-F1. We release IntLawNER as a benchmark and reusable resource for extracting references in international legal texts.

Subjects:

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)

Cite as: arXiv:2609.22529 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.22529v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.22529

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Genis Skura [view email] [v1] Fri, 18 Sep 2026 19:36:30 UTC (509 KB)

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • IntLawNER covers ICJ decisions, UN Security Council resolutions, and ECtHR judgments, with 2,987 gold sentences, 8,094 entity spans, and seven institution-specific entity types.
  • A hybrid algorithmic-agentic pipeline reduces 468k source sentences to a compact annotation set via candidate retrieval, LLM vetting, and human review; 89.6% of gold spans were accepted unchanged from silver.
  • Although boundary-matched Cohen's kappa is 0.964, including missing entities, boundary errors, and label corrections yields macro-F1 0.753, showing aggregate agreement can mislead in domain-specific NER.
  • Zero-shot GLiNER collapses on function-dependent entity types (0.243 micro-F1), while contrastive few-shot examples improve every LLM, with Claude Opus 4.6 reaching 0.873 micro-F1.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.