| --- |
| 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: |
|
|
| 1. **Jurisdictional infection** — models trained on French, Egyptian, US, or Tunisian legal corpora import foreign legal rules into Algerian answers |
| 2. **The linguistic trinity** — questions in Modern Standard Arabic (232), Legal French (12), and Algerian Darja |
| 3. **Temporal legal drift** — amendments that change the law while models retain outdated rules |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: |
|
|
| ```json |
| { |
| "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 |
|
|
| ```bibtex |
| @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 |
|
|
