arXiv:2609.27814v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: In statutory question answering, every claim must be traceable to evidence, not merely relevant, since unverifiable labour-rights answers carry serious legal consequences. Current systems fall short: single-pass RAG cannot detect insufficient evidence, while multi-agent legal-debate systems treat grounding as a prompting convention, letting agents cite unretrieved evidence. To address this gap, we introduce LabourCrew, a multi-agent RAG framework built around three grounding mechanisms: StatuteGraph, a graph index that explicitly links chapter, section, proviso, and cross-reference structure rather than fixed-length spans; an Evidence Exchange Protocol that confines advocates and an interpreter to an evidence ledger, making citation to unretrieved text impossible, while a fault-tolerant supervisor board runs advocates in parallel so individual failures degrade rather than crash the system; and a Calibrated Trust Gate that replaces categorical accept/reject decisions with a trust score, thresholded via conformal risk control for a distribution-free bound on the false-accept rate. We evaluate on LabourActQA, a 500-item Bangla question set from the Bangladesh Labour Act, 2006, spanning seven reasoning categories and three difficulty tiers. The framework drives the empirical false-accept rate to 0.081, within the target level ($\alpha = 0.10$), achieves the highest Answer Relevancy among HyDE RAG, Graph-RAG, and Hierarchical RAG (0.862 $>$ 0.839, 0.815, 0.828), and degrades gradually rather than catastrophically as question difficulty increases. These results show that calibrated abstention, not retrieval quality alone, is what makes legal question answering auditable in low-resource statutory domains.
Abstract: In statutory question answering, every claim must be traceable to evidence, not merely relevant, since unverifiable labour-rights answers carry serious legal consequences. Current systems fall short: single-pass RAG cannot detect insufficient evidence, while multi-agent legal-debate systems treat grounding as a prompting convention, letting agents cite unretrieved evidence. To address this gap, we introduce LabourCrew, a multi-agent RAG framework built around three grounding mechanisms: StatuteGraph, a graph index that explicitly links chapter, section, proviso, and cross-reference structure rather than fixed-length spans; an Evidence Exchange Protocol that confines advocates and an interpreter to an evidence ledger, making citation to unretrieved text impossible, while a fault-tolerant supervisor board runs advocates in parallel so individual failures degrade rather than crash the system; and a Calibrated Trust Gate that replaces categorical accept/reject decisions with a trust score, thresholded via conformal risk control for a distribution-free bound on the false-accept rate. We evaluate on LabourActQA, a 500-item Bangla question set from the Bangladesh Labour Act, 2006, spanning seven reasoning categories and three difficulty tiers. The framework drives the empirical false-accept rate to 0.081, within the target level ($\alpha = 0.10$), achieves the highest Answer Relevancy among HyDE RAG, Graph-RAG, and Hierarchical RAG (0.862 $>$ 0.839, 0.815, 0.828), and degrades gradually rather than catastrophically as question difficulty increases. These results show that calibrated abstention, not retrieval quality alone, is what makes legal question answering auditable in low-resource statutory domains.
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