LexPath: A domain-oriented multi-path framework for legal article retrieval
Legal article retrieval is critical for building traceable and reliable legal AI systems, where conclusions must be grounded in specific legal articles. However, general-purpose retrieval methods rely heavily on lexical or semantic similarity, making it difficult to distinguish legally relevant articles from textually similar but legally inapplicable ones, particularly when they differ in their underlying legal intent. To bridge this gap, we propose LexPath, a domain-oriented multi-path framework comprising a multi-path retrieval module and an intent-aware reranking module. The retrieval module combines two complementary domain-specific paths to collect candidate articles: an IRAC-guided sparse path that expands queries with legally informative keywords, and a structure-guided dense path trained with hard negatives derived from legal hierarchy and citation relations. The reranking module further refines candidate rankings by incorporating the intent compatibility between queries and legal articles. We evaluate LexPath on three Chinese benchmarks spanning diverse query scenarios and further assess its cross-jurisdictional applicability on a Japanese benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that LexPath consistently outperforms lexical, dense, hybrid, and adaptive retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) baselines across all four benchmarks. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of each component. The data and code are available at https://github.com/wxliuabigail/LexPath.