# GuRE:Generative Query REwriter for Legal Passage Retrieval

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12950 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12950/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13663/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07107/) (2023)
- [Document Expansion by Query Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08375/) (2019)
- [Efficient Natural Language Response Suggestion for Smart Reply](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00652/) (2017)
- [SaulLM-7B: A pioneering Large Language Model for Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03883/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models in Law: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03718/) (2023)
- [BM25S: Orders of magnitude faster lexical search via eager sparse scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03618/) (2024)
- [LeCaRDv2: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Case Retrieval Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17609/) (2023)
- [CLERC: A Dataset for Legal Case Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Analysis Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17186/) (2024)
- [Learning Interpretable Legal Case Retrieval via Knowledge-Guided Case Reformulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19760/) (2024)
- [What About the Precedent: An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Common Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12133/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Legal Case Retrieval via Scaling High-quality Synthetic Query-Candidate Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06581/) (2024)

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

- [DALDALL: Data Augmentation for Lexical and Semantic Diverse in Legal Domain by leveraging LLM-Persona](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22765/) (2026)
- [GreekBarRetrieval: A Benchmark for Greek Statutory Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18752/) (2026)
- [When & How to Write for Personalized Demand-aware Query Rewriting in Video Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17667/) (2025)
- [Masking or Mitigating? Deconstructing the Impact of Query Rewriting on Retriever Biases in RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06097/) (2026)
- [Decompose-and-Refine: Structured Legal Question Answering with Parametric Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24454/) (2026)
- [UK-PRBENCH: A Paragraph-Level Precedent Retrieval Benchmark for United Kingdom Case Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24613/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Legal Passage Retrieval (LPR) systems are crucial as they help practitioners save time when drafting legal arguments. However, it remains an underexplored avenue. One primary reason is the significant vocabulary mismatch between the query and the target passage. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, the Generative query REwriter (GuRE). We leverage the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by training the LLM for query rewriting. "Rewritten queries" help retrievers to retrieve target passages by mitigating vocabulary mismatch. Experimental results show that GuRE significantly improves performance in a retriever-agnostic manner, outperforming all baseline methods. Further analysis reveals that different training objectives lead to distinct retrieval behaviors, making GuRE more suitable than direct retriever fine-tuning for real-world applications. Codes are avaiable at github.com/daehuikim/GuRE.