Retrieval-Based Multi-Label Legal Annotation: Extensible, Data-Efficient and Hallucination-Free
Multi-label legal annotation requires assigning multiple labels from large, evolving taxonomies to long, fact-intensive documents, often under limited supervision. Parametric encoders typically require task-specific training and retraining when the label set changes, while prompting generative large language models becomes costly and degrades as the label space grows. We cast legal annotation as retrieval: we embed documents and label descriptions with a frozen retrieval model and predict labels via k-nearest neighbors in the embedding space, enabling updates by re-embedding and re-indexing rather than gradient-based backpropagation. Across three legal datasets (ECtHR-A, ECtHR-B, and Eurl...
| Authors | Li Zhang, Jaromir Savelka, Kevin Ashley |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 16 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 May 2026 |
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