license: cc-by-4.0
language:
- ar
- fr
task_categories:
- question-answering
- text-retrieval
tags:
- legal
- algerian-law
- arabic
- french
- benchmark
- jurisdictional-faithfulness
- hallucination-detection
- information-retrieval
pretty_name: AlgerianLegalBench
size_categories:
- n<1K
configs:
- config_name: default
data_files:
- split: test
path: data/test.jsonl
- split: dev
path: data/dev.jsonl
AlgerianLegalBench
Dataset Description
AlgerianLegalBench is the first evaluation benchmark specifically designed for legal information retrieval systems operating on Algerian law. It addresses three challenges absent from existing benchmarks:
- Jurisdictional infection — models trained on French, Egyptian, US, or Tunisian legal corpora import foreign legal rules into Algerian answers
- The linguistic trinity — questions in Modern Standard Arabic (232), Legal French (12), and Algerian Darja
- Temporal legal drift — amendments that change the law while models retain outdated rules
Key Statistics
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Total questions | 244 |
| Answerable | 204 (83.6%) |
| Unanswerable (infection traps) | 40 (16.4%) |
| Legal categories | 23 |
| Query types | 8 |
| Languages | AR (232), FR (12) |
| Test split | 182 |
| Dev split | 62 |
| Laws in document registry | 30 |
| Inter-annotator κ | 0.829 |
Unanswerable Questions: Foreign-Law Infection Traps
The 40 unanswerable questions probe 7 jurisdictional sources:
| Source | Count | Example concepts |
|---|---|---|
| French | 13 | ISF, rent control, EURL, SAS, garde à vue duration, rupture conventionnelle |
| US | 11 | at-will employment, punitive damages, fair use, jury trial, LWOP |
| Egyptian | 4 | Mandatory bequest, civil marriage officer, pretrial detention |
| Tunisian | 3 | Polygamy ban, adoption plénière, commercial courts |
| UK | 3 | Consideration, duty of care, civil jury |
| Gulf | 2 | Kafeel system, exit permit |
| Algerian absence | 3 | Auto-saisine, municipal taxing, death penalty for corruption |
Evaluation Metrics
Standard: Precision@1, MRR, Citation F1
Novel:
- Jurisdictional Infection Rate (JIR) — % of unanswerable questions where model affirms foreign concept
- Hallucinated Citation Rate (HCR) — % of responses citing non-existent articles
Query Types
| Type | Count | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Rule application | 66 | Apply law to facts |
| Exact article | 59 | Pure statutory retrieval |
| Unanswerable | 40 | Foreign-law traps |
| Multi-hop | 26 | Cross-code reasoning |
| Long context | 17 | Synthesize 4+ articles |
| Layman/Darja | 17 | Non-technical queries |
| Conceptual | 12 | Legal definitions |
| Temporal | 7 | Amendment tracking |
Schema
Each question contains:
{
"id": "fam_ra_q01",
"version": "3.0",
"category": "family_law",
"query_type": "rule_application",
"difficulty": "medium",
"language": "ar",
"question": "...",
"answerable": true,
"expected_documents": ["84-11_1984-06-09"],
"expected_articles": [{"document_id": "...", "article_ref": "54", ...}],
"ground_truth_answer": "...",
"reasoning_chain": ["Step 1 — ...", "Step 2 — ...", "Step 3 — ...", "Step 4 — ..."],
"temporal_note": null,
"annotation": {"annotator_1": "Islam Slimi", "annotator_2": "Ziad Slimi", "kappa": 0.91, ...}
}
Citation
@inproceedings{slimi2026algerianlegal,
title={AlgerianLegalBench: A Native Benchmark for Evaluating Legal Information Retrieval and Jurisdictional Faithfulness in Algerian Law},
author={Slimi, Islam and Slimi, Ziad and {Supervisor}},
booktitle={Proceedings of the ArabicNLP 2026 Conference},
year={2026}
}
Annotation
All questions were authored and cross-annotated by Islam Slimi and Ziad Slimi (law students at Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, University M'Hamed Bougara of Boumerdes, Boumerdes, Algeria). Inter-annotator agreement (Cohen's κ): overall 0.829, easy 0.979, medium 0.904, hard 0.659. Disagreements resolved by senior expert.
License
CC BY 4.0
Contact
ibrahim.attia@ensia.edu.dz maab.chaoui@ensia.edu.dz i.slimi@univ-boumerdes.dz z.slimi@univ-boumerdes.dz