reglab/barexam_qa

Bar Exam QA is a dataset for legal information retrieval and question answering. See the original releasing paper for more information.

This repo contains the public MBE subset of questions (historical exams), which we release with gold passage annotations. In our work, we also evaluate on a private test set of questions from a BarBri multistate bar exam test preparation textbook.

The dataset was created by linking multistate bar exam multiple-choice questions with supporting gold passages from primary sources (caselaw) and secondary sources (online resources, textbooks, etc.). The gold passages were annotated by a law student, simulating a legal research workflow.

qa

The dataset can be loaded with the qa configuration. Each example consists of a question, multiple-choice answers, an answer label, and a gold passage (passage ID) label. The dataset contains 1,195 examples.

dataset = load_dataset("reglab/barexam_qa", name="qa")

where

• idx: unique example ID (string)
• prompt: the question prompt (context before the question, can be shared between questions)
• question: the question
• choice_a: answer choice A text
• choice_b: answer choice B text
• choice_c: answer choice C text
• choice_d: answer choice D text
• answer: A, B, C, or D
• gold_passge: gold passage text
• gold_idx: passage ID of gold passage (matches with passage ID in passages)

passages

The passage pool can be loaded with passages configuration. Each passages consists of a passage ID, the passage text, and additional metadata if applicable (e.g, case ID for passages from Caselaw Access Project). The passage pool contains ~900K passages.

dataset = load_dataset("reglab/barexam_qa", name="passages")

where

• idx: unique passage ID (string)
• faiss_id: unique Faiss ID (integer)
• case_id: case ID (from Caselaw Access Project)
• opinion_id: opinion ID (from Caselaw Access Project)
• absolute_paragraph_id: paragraph ID in case across all opinions (from Caselaw Access Project)
• relative_paragraph_id: paragraph ID in opinion (from Caselaw Access Project)
• text: passage text