Data scarcity remains a persistent challenge in low-resource domains. While existing data augmentation methods leverage the generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to produce large volumes of synthetic data, these approaches often prioritize quantity over quality and lack domain-specific strategies. In this work, we introduce DALDALL, a persona-based data augmentation framework tailored for legal information retrieval (IR). Our method employs domain-specific professional personas--such as attorneys, prosecutors, and judges--to generate synthetic queries that exhibit substantially greater lexical and semantic diversity than vanilla prompting approaches. Experiments on the CLERC and COLIEE benchmarks demonstrate that persona-based augmentation achieves improvement in lexical diversity as measured by Self-BLEU scores, while preserving semantic fidelity to the original queries. Furthermore, dense retrievers fine-tuned on persona-augmented data consistently achieve competitive or superior recall performance compared to those trained on original data or generic augmentations. These findings establish persona-based prompting as an effective strategy for generating high-quality training data in specialized, low-resource domains.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: The DALDALL framework for persona-based data augmentation. Given a legal case statement, the Persona method (top) generates synthetic queries from multiple professional perspectives (attorney, prosecutor, judge, law professor), while the Vanilla method (bottom) does not incorporate persona information. Compared to Vanilla , Persona augmentation produces outputs with 20% greater lexical diversity (Table 1 ).
Figure 2: Triplet composition for fine-tuning on the COLIEE dataset. We chunk a query and positive documents, and find k-best semantic pair with base model. If n is lower than i , then all query chunks are used for the triplet.
Dataset
Approach
Token Len. Avg.
Self-BLEU
Intra-Cos
CLERC
Original
347.7
–
–
Persona
124.83
0.368
0.855
Vanilla
86.14
0.435
0.819
COLIEE
Original
6,379.8
–
–
Persona
118.9
0.318
0.778
Vanilla
79.2
0.414
0.799
Table 1: Lexical and semantic diversity metrics for persona-based and vanilla augmentations on CLERC and COLIEE. Each method generates 5,000 augmented queries per dataset.
Section
Persona
Vanilla
Self-BLEU
Intra-Cos
Self-BLEU
Intra-Cos
1
0.321
0.785
0.463
0.818
2
0.313
0.778
0.429
0.803
3
0.300
0.774
0.421
0.795
4
0.300
0.770
0.410
0.782
5
0.299
0.771
0.395
0.781
Table 2: Diversity metrics by document length on COLIEE. Documents are divided into seven sections of 1,000, ordered by token count (Section 1 = shortest). Lower Self-BLEU and Intra-Cosine scores indicate greater diversity.
Approach
R@1
R@5
R@10
R@20
R@50
Original
0.0540
0.1784
0.2572
0.3348
0.4481
Vanilla
0.0438
0.1406
0.2092
0.2894
0.4035
Persona
0.0410
0.1360
0.1973
0.2690
0.3729
Table 3: BM25 recall on COLIEE. 1,000 original queries are sampled, with 5 augmentations generated per query (5,000 total per method).
Approach
R@1
R@5
R@10
R@20
R@50
Original
0.0271
0.0887
0.1280
0.1827
0.2665
Vanilla
0.0250
0.0708
0.1022
0.1438
0.2149
Persona
0.0208
0.0604
0.0884
0.1241
0.1890
Table 4: Retrieval performance of BGE-base-en-v1.5 (non-fine-tuned) on COLIEE. Dataset sizes are identical to Table 4.
Dataset
Approach
Avg
Mean
COLIEE
Persona
0.697
0.843
Vanilla
0.682
0.840
Table 5: Semantic similarity metrics for COLIEE augmentations.
Figure 3: Distribution of augmented query lengths on COLIEE for 3, 5, 7, and 10 personas. Persona-based prompting yields a broader token distribution than vanilla prompting regardless of persona count.
Figure 4: Effect of persona count on augmentation diversity (COLIEE). Top: Self-BLEU scores (lower = more lexically diverse). Middle: cosine similarity with original queries. Bottom: intra-augmentation cosine similarity (lower = more semantically diverse). Increasing persona count reduces lexical diversity but improves semantic diversity. Five personas offer a balanced trade-off.
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Persona
Set 3
Set 5
Set 7
Set 10
Defense Attorney
✓
✓
✓
✓
Prosecutor
✓
✓
✓
✓
Appellate Judge (Majority)
✓
✓
✓
✓
Appellate Judge (Dissenting)
✓
✓
✓
Law Professor
✓
✓
✓
Trial Judge
✓
✓
Appendix
Table 6: Persona inclusion by set size.
Configuration
CLERC
COLIEE
Original
1,000
∼ 5,000 (chunked)
Vanilla only
5,000
5,000
Vanilla mix
5,000
5,000
Persona only
5,000
5,000
Persona mix
5,000
5,000
Appendix
Table 7: Number of training samples per configuration.
Category
Parameter
Value
Training
Seed
42
Epochs
3
Learning rate
2e-5
Warmup ratio
0.1
Temperature
0.05
Chunking
BGE-base
512 / 80
Appendix
Table 8: Training hyperparameters and chunking configurations.
Model
Approach
COLIEE
CLERC
R@1
R@5
R@10
R@20
R@1
R@5
R@10
R@20
BGE-base-en-v1.5
Baseline
0.076
0.228
0.316
0.413
0.586
0.782
0.826
0.880
Original
0.075
0.247
0.361
0.470
0.718
0.900
0.924
0.962
Persona Only
0.075
0.263
0.375
0.497
0.688
0.880
0.916
0.952
Persona Mix
0.075
0.263
0.375
0.498
0.718
0.902
0.926
0.964
Vanilla Only
0.074
0.255
0.364
0.475
0.702
0.896
0.926
0.962
Appendix
Table 9: Recall scores of fine-tuned retrievers on COLIEE and CLERC. Best scores are in bold , and second-best scores are underlined .
In recent years, the rapid proliferation of open-source large language models (LLMs) has spurred efforts to turn general-purpose models into domain specialists. However, many domain-specialized LLMs are developed using datasets and training protocols that are not aligned with the nuanced requirements of real-world applications. In the legal domain, where precision and reliability are essential, this lack of consideration limits practical utility. In this study, we propose a systematic training framework grounded in the practical needs of the legal domain, with a focus on Korean law. We introduce LegalMidm, a Korean legal-domain LLM, and present a methodology for constructing high-quality, use-case-driven legal datasets and optimized training pipelines. Our approach emphasizes collaboration with legal professionals and rigorous data curation to ensure relevance and factual accuracy, and demonstrates effectiveness in key legal tasks.
Youngjoon Jang, Chanhee Park, Hyeonseok Moon +5
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University · KT (Korea Telecom)
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite extensive pretraining on broad internet corpora, often struggle to adapt effectively to specialized domains. There is growing interest in fine-tuning these models for such domains; however, progress is constrained by the scarcity and limited coverage of high-quality, task-relevant data. To address this, synthetic data generation methods such as paraphrasing or knowledge extraction are commonly applied. Although these approaches excel at factual recall and conceptual knowledge, they suffer from two critical shortcomings: (i) they provide minimal support for interpretive reasoning capabilities in these specialized domains, and (ii) they often produce synthetic corpora that are excessively large and redundant, resulting in poor sample efficiency. To overcome these gaps, we propose an adversarial question-generation framework that produces a compact set of semantically challenging questions. These questions are constructed by comparing the outputs of the model to be adapted and a robust expert model grounded in reference documents, using an iterative, feedback-driven process designed to reveal and address comprehension gaps. Evaluation on specialized subsets of the LegalBench corpus demonstrates that our method achieves greater accuracy with substantially fewer synthetic samples.
Vincent Grari, Ciprian Tomoiaga, Sylvain Lamprier +2
AXA Group Operations · TRAIL, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France · LERIA, Université d’Angers, France +2
Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well in short contexts but degrade on long legal documents, often producing hallucinations such as incorrect clauses or precedents. In the legal domain, where precision is critical, such errors undermine reliability and trust. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) helps ground outputs but remains limited in legal settings, especially with small, locally deployed models required for data privacy. We identify two failure modes: retrieval errors due to lexical redundancy in legal corpora, and decoding errors where models generate answers despite insufficient context. To address this, we propose Metadata Enriched Hybrid RAG to improve document level retrieval, and apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to enforce safe refusal when context is inadequate. Together, these methods improve grounding, reliability, and safety in legal language models.