Neural reranking for UK statutory retrieval: Provision-level evaluation and an open distilled model

Abstract This work explores provision-level retrieval and neural reranking for UK primary and secondary legislation. We introduce UK-StatuteCorpus , a corpus of recent UK Acts and statutory instruments from legislation.gov.uk , together with a 100-query evaluation set of practitioner-style questions whose graded relevance judgements distinguish legally operative, supporting and contextual provisions. Using BM25 and an MPNet-based dense retriever to build candidate sets, we evaluate ten neural re