Navigating Global AI Regulation: A Multi-Jurisdictional Retrieval-Augmented Generation System

arXiv cs.CL / 4/29/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces a multi-jurisdictional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system to help researchers, policymakers, and legal professionals navigate AI regulation across different countries and regions.
  • It builds a specialized corpus of 242 documents spanning 68 jurisdictions, including both structured laws (e.g., the EU AI Act) and unstructured materials like national AI strategies.
  • The system’s key technical advances are type-specific chunking to retain legal structure, conditional retrieval routing using entity detection and metadata for citation-aware legal retrieval, and priority-based re-ranking to favor enacted legislation over policies and secondary sources.
  • Evaluation on 50 queries shows strong results, with 0.87 average faithfulness and 0.84 average answer relevancy, and particularly higher relevancy for single-entity questions.
  • Overall, the findings suggest that domain-specific retrieval strategies can significantly improve performance when querying complex and heterogeneous regulatory text collections.

Abstract

Navigating AI regulation across jurisdictions is increasingly difficult for policymakers, legal professionals, and researchers. To address this, we present a multi-jurisdictional Retrieval-Augmented Generation system for global AI regulation. Our corpus includes 242 documents across 68 jurisdictions, ranging from formal legislation like the EU AI Act to unstructured policy documents such as national AI strategies. The system makes three technical contributions: type-specific chunking that preserve legal structure across heterogenous documents; conditional retrieval routing with entity detection and metadata for legal citations; and priority-based re-ranking to boost enacted legislation over policy and secondary sources. Evaluation of 50 queries reveals strong performance across both single-entity and multi-jurisdictional questions, achieving 0.87 average faithfulness and 0.84 average answer relevancy. Single-entity queries achieve 0.86 average faithfulness and 0.92 average answer relevancy, while multi-jurisdictional comparison queries achieve 0.88 average faithfulness and 0.75 average answer relevancy. These findings highlight the effectiveness of domain-specific retrieval strategies for navigating complex, heterogenous regulatory corpora.