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 Temporal legal drift — amendments that change the law while models retain outdated rules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

{
  "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