Welcome to
RegNLP 2025
Regulatory Natural Language Processing Workshop

The RegNLP 2025 Workshop will take place on January 20th, 2025 in conjunction with the COLING 2025 conference in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

About

The complexity, volume, and ever-changing nature of regulatory documents present unique challenges in governance, compliance, and legal frameworks across various sectors. Addressing these challenges demands specialized approaches in natural language processing (NLP) to enable effective management and utilization of regulatory content.

Recent advancements in NLP have opened new avenues for tackling these issues, specifically tailored to the domain of regulatory documents. These advancements include sophisticated techniques for document parsing, entity recognition, and automated compliance checking, which are essential for navigating the intricate landscape of regulatory requirements.

Despite these technological strides, significant open questions and challenges remain. How can NLP models better handle the dynamic and diverse nature of regulatory texts? What methods are most effective for extracting and synthesizing information from vast and complex document repositories? How can we ensure the accuracy and reliability of automated compliance tools? Moreover, what are the best practices for adapting NLP models to the highly specialized language and context of regulatory documents?

The first workshop on Regulatory Natural Language Processing (RegNLP) aims to convene a diverse group of researchers and practitioners from NLP, legal informatics, compliance, and related fields to explore these questions.

In addition, we are hosting the RIRAG (Regulatory Information Retrieval and Answer Generation) shared task, which focuses on advancing methods for regulatory compliance through information retrieval and answer generation.

This workshop seeks to share current findings, discuss challenges, and identify promising directions for future research. Most importantly, it aims to foster a collaborative community dedicated to advancing NLP applications in the regulatory domain at this critical juncture.

Topics

We welcome submissions describing original work on regulatory data, as well as data with relevance to compliance and regulation, such as:

Applications of NLP to regulatory tasks including, but not limited to:

Adapting NLP methods for regulatory data including, but not limited to:

Tasks and resources:

Demos:

Industrial Research:

Interdisciplinary position papers:

!!! We have prepared a dataset for RegNLP researchers, which can be used for various regulatory NLP research tasks.

!!! The ObliQA dataset is available on GitHub : https://github.com/RegNLP/ObliQADataset.

Workshop Program

09:00–10:15 Session 1
9:00–9:05Opening Remarks
9:05–9:35Invited Speaker
9:35–9:55Shared Task RIRAG-2025: Regulatory Information Retrieval and Answer Generation
Tuba Gokhan, Kexin Wang, Iryna Gurevych and Ted Briscoe
9:55–10:15Challenges in Technical Regulatory Text Variation Detection
Shriya Vaagdevi Chikati, Samuel Larkin, David Minicola and Chi-kiu Lo
10:15–11:00 Coffee Break
11:00–12:20 Session 2
11:00–11:30Invited Speaker
11:30–11:55Bilingual BSARD: Extending Statutory Article Retrieval to Dutch
Ehsan Lotfi, Nikolay Banar, Nerses Yuzbashyan and Walter Daelemans
11:55–12:20Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for efficient Regulatory Information Retrieval and Answer Generation
Kishore Vanapalli, Aravind Kilaru, Omair Shafiq and Shahzad Khan
11:20–14:00 Lunch Break
14:00–15:20 Session 3
14:00–14:20A Hybrid Approach to Information Retrieval and Answer Generation for Regulatory Texts
Jhon Stewar Rayo Mosquera, Carlos Raul De La Rosa Peredo and Mario Garrido Cordoba
14:20–14:401-800-SHARED-TASKS at RegNLP: Lexical Reranking of Semantic Retrieval (LeSeR) for Regulatory Question Answering
Jebish Purbey, Drishti Sharma, Siddhant Gupta, Khawaja Murad, Siddartha Pullakhandam and Ram Mohan Rao Kadiyala
14:40–15:00MST-R: Multi-Stage Tuning for Retrieval Systems and Metric Evaluation
Yash Malviya, Karan Dhingra and Maneesh Singh
15:00–15:20AUEB-Archimedes at RIRAG-2025: Is Obligation concatenation really all you need?
Ioannis Chasandras, Odysseas S. Chlapanis and Ion Androutsopoulos
15:20–16:00 Coffee Break
16:00–17:30 Poster Session
16:00–17:30Structured Tender Entities Extraction from Complex Tables with Few-short Learning
Asim Abbas, Mark Lee, Niloofer Shanavas, Venelin Kovatchev and Mubashir Ali
16:00–17:30A Two-Stage LLM System for Enhanced Regulatory Information Retrieval and Answer Generation
Fengzhao Sun, Jun Yu, Jiaming Hou, yutong lin and Tianyu Liu
16:00–17:30NUST Nova at RIRAG 2025: A Hybrid Framework for Regulatory Information Retrieval and Question Answering
Mariam Babar Khan, Huma Ameer, Seemab Latif and Mehwish Fatima
16:00–17:30NUST Alpha at RIRAG 2025: Fusion RAG for Bridging Lexical and Semantic Retrieval and Question Answering
Muhammad Rouhan Faisal, Muhammad Abdullah, Faizyaab Ali Shah, Shalina Riaz, Huma Ameer, Seemab Latif and Mehwish Fatima
16:00–17:30NUST Omega at RIRAG 2025: Investigating Context-aware Retrieval and Answer Generations-Lessons and Challenges
Huma Ameer, Muhammad Hannan Akram, Seemab Latif and Mehwish Fatima
16:00–17:30Enhancing Regulatory Compliance Through Automated Retrieval, Reranking, and Answer Generation
Kübranur Umar, Hakan Doğan, Onur Özcan, İsmail Karakaya, Alper Karamanlıoğlu and Berkan Demirel
16:00–17:30A REGNLP Framework: Developing Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Regulatory Document Analysis
Ozan Bayer, Elif Nehir ULU, Yasemin Sarkın, Ekrem Sütçü, Defne Buse Çelik, Alper Karamanlıoğlu, İsmail Karakaya and Berkan Demirel
16:00–17:30Regulatory Question-Answering using Generative AI
Devin Quinn, Sumit P. Pai, Iman Yousfi, Nirmala Pudota and Sanmitra Bhattacharya
16:00–17:30RIRAG: A Bi-Directional Retrieval-Enhanced Framework for Financial Legal QA in ObliQA Shared Task
Xinyan Zhang, Xiaobing Feng, Xiujuan Xu, zhiliang zheng and Kai Wu
16:00–17:30RAGulator: Effective RAG for Regulatory Question Answering
Islam Aushev, Egor Kratkov, Evgenii Nikoalev, Andrei Vladimirovich Glinskii, Vasilii Krikunov, Alexander Panchenko, Vasily Konovalov and Julia Belikova

Invited Speakers

Annie Antón

Annie Antón

Georgia Institute of Technology

Barry West

Barry West

ADGM

Workshop Organizers

Tuba Gokhan

Tuba Gokhan

MBZUAI

Kexin Wang

Kexin Wang

UKP Lab, Techinical University of Darmstadt

Iryna Gurevych

Iryna Gurevych

UKP Lab, Techinical University of Darmstadt & MBZUAI

Ted Briscoe

Ted Briscoe

MBZUAI

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

  • Sallam Abualhaija, University of Luxembourg
  • Chetan Arora, Monash University
  • Thales Bertaglia, Maastricht University
  • Travis D. Breaux, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Silvana Castano, University of Milan
  • Luigi Di Caro, University of Turin
  • Ashish Chouhan, Heidelberg University
  • Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru, University of Maryland
  • Alfio Ferrara, University of Milan
  • Tunga Gungor, Bogazici University
  • Lena Held, UKP Lab, Technical University of Darmstadt
  • Timour Igamberdiev, UKP Lab, Technical University of Darmstadt
  • Daniel Martin Katz, Chicago-Kent College of Law - Illinois Institute of Technology
  • Manolis Koubarakis,National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
  • Prodromos Malakasiotis, Athens University of Economics and Business
  • Luisa Mich, University of Trento
  • Paulo Quaresma, University of Evora
  • Carlo Sansone, University of Naples Federico II
  • Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis, University of York
  • Peter Vickers, University of Sheffield
  • Nicola Zeni, University of Trento