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

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[Submitted on 18 Jul 2026]

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

View a PDF of the paper titled NOWJ@COLIEE 2026: Adaptive Pipelines for Legal Retrieval and Reasoning, by Thuong-Hieu Ngo and 7 other authors

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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.

Comments: Presented at COLIEE 2026

Subjects:

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

Cite as: arXiv:2607.16603 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2607.16603v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.16603

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Ha Thanh Nguyen [view email] [v1] Sat, 18 Jul 2026 02:46:06 UTC (126 KB)

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