AQuAECHR: Attributed Question Answering for European Court of Human Rights

Korbinian Q. Weidinger, Santosh T.y.s.s, Oana Ichim, Matthias Grabmair


Abstract
LLMs have become prevalent tools for information seeking across various fields, including law. However, their generated responses often suffer from hallucinations, hindering their widespread adoption in high stakes domains such as law, which can potentially mislead experts and propagate societal harms. To enhance trustworthiness in these systems, one promising approach is to attribute the answer to an actual source, thereby improving the factuality and verifiability of the response. In pursuit of advancing attributed legal question answering, we introduce AQuAECHR, a benchmark comprising information-seeking questions from ECHR jurisprudence along with attributions to relevant judgments. We present strategies to automatically curate this dataset from ECHR case law guides and utilize an LLM-based filtering pipeline to improve dataset quality, as validated by legal experts. Additionally, we assess several LLMs, including those trained on legal corpora, on this dataset to underscore significant challenges with the current models and strategies dealing with attributed QA, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.74
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1418–1447
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.74/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Korbinian Q. Weidinger, Santosh T.y.s.s, Oana Ichim, and Matthias Grabmair. 2025. AQuAECHR: Attributed Question Answering for European Court of Human Rights. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 1418–1447, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AQuAECHR: Attributed Question Answering for European Court of Human Rights (Weidinger et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.74.pdf