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 .