{"paper":{"title":"Section-Weighted Hybrid Approach for Legal Case Retrieval","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.IR","authors_text":"Nisansa de Silva, Rajith Arulanandam","submitted_at":"2026-06-02T04:27:53Z","abstract_excerpt":"Finding truly analogous precedents requires capturing legal reasoning beyond surface word overlap. We present a two-stage, section-aware framework for legal case retrieval that first segments raw judgments into facts, issues, decision, and reasoning using a deterministic large language model (LLM) offline. In Stage 1, we combine parallel lexical (BM25) and semantic (dense ANN) whole-document searches via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) to form a high-recall candidate pool. In Stage 2, we perform fine-grained, like-for-like comparisons (e.g., query reasoning vs. candidate reasoning). To address th"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.03138","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.03138/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}