ANNOTARES: A Dataset for Extracting Logical Structures from German Statutory Texts

arXiv:2608.03898 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-08-04 · Read on arXiv

Ronja Schwarz, Jannik Strötgen

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-08-04

Comments: Accepted at KONVENS 2026

Code: https://github.com/wilhelmines/annotares

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: The automatic structural analysis of legal texts is a cornerstone of legal technology, yet the extraction of their logical components remains a significant challenge.

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Abstract

The automatic structural analysis of legal texts is a cornerstone of legal technology, yet the extraction of their logical components remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce the task of identifying and segmenting legal conditions (Tatbestand) and legal consequences (Rechtsfolge) within German statutory texts. To support this task, we present ANNOTARES (Annotations of Tatbestand-Rechtsfolge Sequences), a novel dataset comprising German law texts with span-level annotations. Spanning three distinct legal codes, the dataset is designed to evaluate both domain-specific performance and cross-statute generalizability. We benchmark diverse architectural approaches: a rule-based baseline, CRFs, BiLSTMs, BiLSTM-CRF, and modern Transformer-based models, including BERT variants and LLM-based methods. Our results demonstrate that BERT and LLM-based models achieve superior performance in capturing the complex syntactic structures of legal language. We release our dataset to facilitate further research in automated legal reasoning.

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