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arXiv · 2604.06098

JU\'A -- A Benchmark for Information Retrieval in Brazilian Legal Text Collections

Jayr Pereira·Leandro Fernandes·Erick de Brito·Roberto Lotufo·Luiz Bonifacio
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Abstract

Legal information retrieval in Portuguese remains difficult to evaluate systematically because available datasets differ widely in document type, query style, and relevance definition. We present JU\'A, a public benchmark for Brazilian legal retrieval designed to support more reproducible and comparable evaluation across heterogeneous legal collections. More broadly, JU\'A is intended not only as a benchmark, but as a continuous evaluation infrastructure for Brazilian legal IR, combining shared protocols, common ranking metrics, fixed splits when applicable, and a public leaderboard. The benchmark covers jurisprudence retrieval as well as broader legislative, regulatory, and question-driven legal search. We evaluate lexical, dense, and BM25-based reranking pipelines, including a domain-adapted Qwen embedding model fine-tuned on JU\'A-aligned supervision. Results show that the benchmark is sufficiently heterogeneous to distinguish retrieval paradigms and reveal substantial cross-dataset trade-offs. Domain adaptation yields its clearest gains on the supervision-aligned JU\'A-Juris subset, while BM25 remains highly competitive on other collections, especially in settings with strong lexical and institutional phrasing cues. Overall, JU\'A provides a practical evaluation framework for studying legal retrieval across multiple Brazilian legal domains under a common benchmark design.

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Jayr Pereira, Leandro Fernandes, Erick de Brito, Roberto Lotufo, Luiz Bonifacio. 2026-04-07. JU\'A -- A Benchmark for Information Retrieval in Brazilian Legal Text Collections. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06098

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