LexCLiPR: Cross-Lingual Paragraph Retrieval from Legal Judgments

Efficient retrieval of pinpointed information from case law is crucial for legal professionals but challenging due to the length and complexity of legal judgments. Existing works mostly often focus on retrieving entire cases rather than precise, paragraph-level information. Moreover, multilingual legal practice necessitates cross-lingual retrieval, most works have been limited to monolingual settings. To address these gaps, we introduce LexCLiPR, a cross-lingual dataset for paragraph-level retrieval from European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments, leveraging multilingual case law guides and distant supervision to curate our dataset. We evaluate retrieval models in a zero-shot setting, revealing the limitations of pre-trained multilingual models for crosslingual tasks in low-resource languages and the importance of retrieval based post-training strategies. In fine-tuning settings, we observe that two-tower models excel in cross-lingual retrieval, while siamese architectures are better suited for monolingual tasks. Fine-tuning multilingual models on native language queries improves performance but struggles to generalize to unseen legal concepts, highlighting the need for robust strategies to address topical distribution shifts in the legal queries. 1 . * https://www.echr.coe.int/knowledge-sharing * Not all guides are available in every language *