From Answers to Guidance: A Proactive Dialogue System for Legal Documents

2025-10-22

AI Summary

EU legal texts exhibit high domain specificity and low accessibility, posing significant comprehension and application barriers for non-experts. To address this, we propose LexGuide—the first proactive, multi-turn dialogue system specifically designed for EU legal documents. Departing from conventional reactive paradigms, LexGuide orchestrates dialogue progression via hierarchical topic modeling, integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for factual grounding, and employs structured dialogue management to ensure coherence and task alignment. Evaluated on our novel EUDial dataset—comprising 204 legal blog articles and 880 real-world dialogue turns—LexGuide demonstrates substantial improvements in users’ efficiency of legal information retrieval and depth of conceptual understanding. It also enhances topical coverage and dialogue continuity, thereby effectively bridging the gap between legal accessibility and public legal literacy.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Conversational AI/Dialog Systems
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval
• Humans and AI: AI for Accessibility

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking

Abstract

The accessibility of legal information remains a constant challenge, particularly for laypersons seeking to understand and apply complex institutional texts. While the European Union provides open access to legislation, parliamentary responses, and regulatory documents, these resources can be challenging for laypeople to explore. In this paper, we introduce EUDial, a proactive multi-turn dialogue dataset constructed from 204 blogs curated by the Citizens' Enquiries Unit (AskEP) of the European Parliamentary Research Service. EUDial contains 880 dialogue turns (averaging 4.3 turns per dialogue), where each dialogue includes initial questions, structured answers, and follow-up questions. Beyond dataset construction, we propose the LexGuide framework that leverages retrieval-augmented generation with hierarchical topic organization to structure dialogue progression, ensuring both comprehensive coverage of legal aspects and coherence across conversational turns. The results demonstrate that proactive, structured navigation closes the gap between the availability of legal information and citizen comprehension, establishing EUDial and LexGuide as practical resources for advancing proactive legal dialogue systems.

Problem

• Addressing legal information accessibility for laypersons
• Structuring dialogue progression for complex legal documents
• Bridging the gap between legal availability and comprehension

Innovation

• Proactive dialogue system for legal documents
• Retrieval-augmented generation with hierarchical organization
• Structured navigation bridging legal information accessibility