Schematize: An Agentic System for Generating and Refining Information-Extraction Schemas for Legal Research

arXiv:2609.22209 · cs.CL, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-09-01 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-09-01

Updated: 2026-09-01

Comments: Accepted for EMNLP 2026 (System Demonstration)

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The gist: Empirical legal research often relies on turning research questions into structured data extracted from large collections of rulings and judgments.

Terminology

Abstract

Empirical legal research often relies on turning research questions into structured data extracted from large collections of rulings and judgments. Designing the extraction schema and then extracting the data remain a manual, expertise-heavy bottleneck. We present schematize, an open-source multi-agent system that interactively turns a researcher's problem statement into a validated extraction schema that can later be used for autonomous extraction. Schematize couples (i) a clarification dialogue that elicits implicit expert intent, (ii) iterative schema generation, (iii) data-grounded refinement that tests the schema against documents, and (iv) chat-based post-editing. We evaluated the system with human legal professional, introducing our novel methodology, and schematize achieves top performance in most of tested configurations. While the system is designed to be domain-agnostic and applicable to any document collection, we tailor and evaluate it on legal research problems. We release schematize as a pip-installable Python package with full documentation.

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