What Makes a Good Fiqh Retriever? Answer Retrieval for Arabic Islamic Jurisprudence

2026-08-20

AI Summary

研究通过构建阿拉伯菲格测试集，评估多种检索策略，解决伊斯兰法学问题回答中的检索失败难以隔离的问题。

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation is used for Islamic question answering, but most systems are evaluated end-to-end, making retrieval failures difficult to isolate from generation failures. We study answer-bearing retrieval for Arabic fiqh, where a passage is relevant only if it states the ruling required by the question. We build a retrieval test collection for Arabic fiqh and use it to evaluate dense, lexical, hybrid, fine-tuned, and madhhab-aware retrieval strategies. The best retriever achieves 0.524 MRR@5, while fine-tuning improves performance to 0.553. Hybrid retrieval provides limited gains for strong models, whereas madhhab-aware filtering more than doubles MRR@5 on school-specific questions. We further present an error analysis showing that the main challenge is distinguishing answer-bearing passages from topically similar passages that do not contain the requested ruling.

Problem

• Arabic Fiqh
• Answer Retrieval
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• MRR@5
• Madhhab-aware

Innovation

• retrieval-augmented generation
• Arabic fiqh
• madhhab-aware retrieval
• hybrid retrieval
• MRR@5