---
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 **Temporal legal drift** — amendments that change the law while models retain outdated rules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