We present GerDaLIR, a German Dataset for Legal Information Retrieval based on case documents from the open legal information platform Open Legal Data. The dataset consists of 123K queries, each labelled with at least one relevant document in a collection of 131K case documents. We conduct several baseline experiments including BM25 and a state-of-the-art neural re-ranker. With our dataset, we aim to provide a standardized benchmark for German LIR and promote open research in this area. Beyond that, our dataset comprises sufficient training data to be used as a downstream task for German or multilingual language models.

Many recent approaches towards neural information retrieval mitigate their computational costs by using a multi-stage ranking pipeline. In the first stage, a number of potentially relevant candidates are retrieved using an efficient retrieval model such as BM25. Although BM25 has proven decent performance as a first-stage ranker, it tends to miss relevant passages. In this context we propose CoRT, a simple neural first-stage ranking model that leverages contextual representations from pretrained language models such as BERT to complement term-based ranking functions while causing no significant delay at query time. Using the MS MARCO dataset, we show that CoRT significantly increases the candidate recall by complementing BM25 with missing candidates. Consequently, we find subsequent re-rankers achieve superior results with less candidates. We further demonstrate that passage retrieval using CoRT can be realized with surprisingly low latencies.