# LexDrafter: Terminology Drafting for Legislative Documents using Retrieval Augmented Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16295 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16295/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04696/) (2020)
- [Evaluation of Text Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14799/) (2020)
- [EUR-Lex-Sum: A Multi- and Cross-lingual Dataset for Long-form Summarization in the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13448/) (2022)
- [Natural Language Processing in the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12039/) (2023)
- [Extreme Multi-Label Legal Text Classification: A case study in EU Legislation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10892/) (2019)
- [FABULA: Intelligence Report Generation Using Retrieval-Augmented Narrative Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13848/) (2023)
- [From RAGs to riches: Utilizing large language models to write documents for clinical trials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16406/) (2024)
- [CLAUSEREC: A Clause Recommendation Framework for AI-aided Contract Authoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15794/) (2021)
- [Document Automation Architectures and Technologies: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11603/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Studying Large Language Model Behaviors Under Context-Memory Conflicts With Real Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16032/) (2024)
- [Elevating Legal LLM Responses: Harnessing Trainable Logical Structures and Semantic Knowledge with Legal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07912/) (2025)
- [LegalRAG: A Hybrid RAG System for Multilingual Legal Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16121/) (2025)
- [REIS: A High-Performance and Energy-Efficient Retrieval System with In-Storage Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16444/) (2025)
- [From Answers to Guidance: A Proactive Dialogue System for Legal Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19723/) (2025)
- [Comparing the Performance of LLMs in RAG-based Question-Answering: A Case Study in Computer Science Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03261/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the increase in legislative documents at the EU, the number of new terms and their definitions is increasing as well. As per the Joint Practical Guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission, terms used in legal documents shall be consistent, and identical concepts shall be expressed without departing from their meaning in ordinary, legal, or technical language. Thus, while drafting a new legislative document, having a framework that provides insights about existing definitions and helps define new terms based on a document's context will support such harmonized legal definitions across different regulations and thus avoid ambiguities. In this paper, we present LexDrafter, a framework that assists in drafting Definitions articles for legislative documents using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and existing term definitions present in different legislative documents. For this, definition elements are built by extracting definitions from existing documents. Using definition elements and RAG, a Definitions article can be suggested on demand for a legislative document that is being drafted. We demonstrate and evaluate the functionality of LexDrafter using a collection of EU documents from the energy domain. The code for LexDrafter framework is available at https://github.com/achouhan93/LexDrafter.