# Exploring Selective Retrieval-Augmentation for Long-Tail Legal Text Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19997 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19997/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00976/) (2021)
- [CUAD: An Expert-Annotated NLP Dataset for Legal Contract Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06268/) (2021)
- [Large-Scale Multi-Label Text Classification on EU Legislation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02192/) (2019)
- [CLAUDETTE: an Automated Detector of Potentially Unfair Clauses in Online Terms of Service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01217/) (2018)
- [Natural Language Processing for the Legal Domain: A Survey of Tasks, Datasets, Models, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21306/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Deep Long-Tail Classification Advancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15593/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [HIRA: A Human-in-the-Loop Retrieval-Augmented Cascade for Document Classification in Regulated Industries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21792/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Legal text classification is a fundamental NLP task in the legal domain. Benchmark datasets in this area often exhibit a long-tail label distribution, where many labels are underrepresented, leading to poor model performance on rare classes. This paper explores Selective Retrieval-Augmentation (SRA) as a proof-of-concept approach to this problem. SRA focuses on augmenting samples belonging to low-frequency labels in the training set, preventing the introduction of noise for well-represented classes, and requires no changes to the model architecture. Retrieval is performed only from the training data to ensure there is no potential information leakage, removing the need for external corpora simultaneously. SRA is tested on two legal text classification benchmark datasets with long-tail distributions: LEDGAR (single-label) and UNFAIR-ToS (multi-label). Results show that SRA achieves consistent gains in both micro-F1 and macro-F1 over LexGLUE baselines.