@inproceedings{yu-etal-2026-regtrack,
    title = "{R}eg{T}rack: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Multi-Class Legal Change Detection",
    author = "Yu, Joe  and
      Li, Kevin Chenhao  and
      Ostarek, Julian",
    editor = "T.Y.S.S., Santosh  and
      Rodriguez, Juan Diego  and
      de Gibert, Ona",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics ({ACL} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-srw.68/",
    pages = "764--778",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-393-7",
    abstract = "Organizations must continuously monitor evolving regulations to maintain compliance. While current tools are limited to surface-level text comparison, existing models lack the finegrained classification schemes to determine whether small changes impact legal obligations or merely update formatting. To address this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark for change detection in EU regulations. It comprises 4,772 manually annotated pairs of structurally distinct provisions, defined as Atomic Legal Units (ALUs), mapped to a six-class taxonomy of legal change types. We formalize three core tasks: structural alignment, change classification, and a combined task requiring simultaneous alignment and classification. Evaluating lexical algorithms, dense encoders, and Large Language Models (LLMs) as baselines, we find LLMs excel at isolated change classification, whereas domain-specific dense encoders offer the most robust combined performance. By providing fine-grained labeled data, this benchmark enables the development of AI systems that can help organizations analyze regulatory shifts and support version-aware retrieval in the legal domain."
}