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HUKUKBERT: Domain-Specific Language Model for Turkish Law

Mehmet Utku Öztürk, Tansu Türkoğlu, Buse Buz-Yalug · Apr 6, 2026 · Citations: 0

How to use this paper page

Coverage: Recent

Use this page to decide whether the paper is strong enough to influence an eval design. It summarizes the abstract plus available structured metadata. If the signal is thin, use it as background context and compare it against stronger hub pages before making protocol choices.

Best use

Background context only

Metadata: Recent

Trust level

Low

Signals: Recent

What still needs checking

Extraction flags indicate low-signal or possible false-positive protocol mapping.

Signal confidence: 0.35

Abstract

Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have increasingly enabled LegalTech applications, yet existing studies specific to Turkish law have still been limited due to the scarcity of domain-specific data and models. Although extensive models like LEGAL-BERT have been developed for English legal texts, the Turkish legal domain lacks a domain-specific high-volume counterpart. In this paper, we introduce HukukBERT, the most comprehensive legal language model for Turkish, trained on a 18 GB cleaned legal corpus using a hybrid Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training (DAPT) methodology integrating Whole-Word Masking, Token Span Masking, Word Span Masking, and targeted Keyword Masking. We systematically compared our 48K WordPiece tokenizer and DAPT approach against general-purpose and existing domain-specific Turkish models. Evaluated on a novel Legal Cloze Test benchmark -- a masked legal term prediction task designed for Turkish court decisions -- HukukBERT achieves state-of-the-art performance with 84.40\% Top-1 accuracy, substantially outperforming existing models. Furthermore, we evaluated HukukBERT in the downstream task of structural segmentation of official Turkish court decisions, where it achieves a 92.8\% document pass rate, establishing a new state-of-the-art. We release HukukBERT to support future research in Turkish legal NLP tasks, including recognition of named entities, prediction of judgment, and classification of legal documents.

Use caution before copying this protocol

Use this page for context, then validate protocol choices against stronger HFEPX references before implementation decisions.

  • Extraction flags indicate low-signal or possible false-positive protocol mapping.
  • Extraction confidence is 0.35 (below strong-reference threshold).

HFEPX Relevance Assessment

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

Extraction flags indicate low-signal or possible false-positive protocol mapping.

Trust level

Low

Eval-Fit Score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

HFEPX Fit

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence: Low

What This Page Found In The Paper

Each field below shows whether the signal looked explicit, partial, or missing in the available metadata. Use this to judge what is safe to trust directly and what still needs full-paper validation.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

Confidence: Low Not found

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

Evidence snippet: Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have increasingly enabled LegalTech applications, yet existing studies specific to Turkish law have still been limited due to the scarcity of domain-specific data and models.

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Confidence: Low Direct evidence

Includes extracted eval setup.

Evidence snippet: Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have increasingly enabled LegalTech applications, yet existing studies specific to Turkish law have still been limited due to the scarcity of domain-specific data and models.

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

Confidence: Low Not found

No explicit QC controls found.

Evidence snippet: Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have increasingly enabled LegalTech applications, yet existing studies specific to Turkish law have still been limited due to the scarcity of domain-specific data and models.

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

Confidence: Low Not found

No benchmark anchors detected.

Evidence snippet: Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have increasingly enabled LegalTech applications, yet existing studies specific to Turkish law have still been limited due to the scarcity of domain-specific data and models.

Reported Metrics

partial

Accuracy, Top 1 accuracy

Confidence: Low Direct evidence

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

Evidence snippet: Evaluated on a novel Legal Cloze Test benchmark -- a masked legal term prediction task designed for Turkish court decisions -- HukukBERT achieves state-of-the-art performance with 84.40\% Top-1 accuracy, substantially outperforming existing models.

Rater Population

missing

Unknown

Confidence: Low Not found

Rater source not explicitly reported.

Evidence snippet: Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have increasingly enabled LegalTech applications, yet existing studies specific to Turkish law have still been limited due to the scarcity of domain-specific data and models.

Human Data Lens

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Unknown
  • Unit of annotation: Unknown
  • Expertise required: Law
  • Signal basis: Structured extraction plus abstract evidence.

Evaluation Lens

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Signal confidence: 0.35
  • Known cautions: low_signal, possible_false_positive

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

accuracytop-1 accuracy

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have increasingly enabled LegalTech applications, yet existing studies specific to Turkish law have still been limited due to the scarcity of domain-specific data and models.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have increasingly enabled LegalTech applications, yet existing studies specific to Turkish law have still been limited due to the scarcity of domain-specific data and models.
  • Although extensive models like LEGAL-BERT have been developed for English legal texts, the Turkish legal domain lacks a domain-specific high-volume counterpart.
  • In this paper, we introduce HukukBERT, the most comprehensive legal language model for Turkish, trained on a 18 GB cleaned legal corpus using a hybrid Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training (DAPT) methodology integrating Whole-Word Masking, Token Span Masking, Word Span Masking, and targeted Keyword Masking.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Automatic metrics) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • In this paper, we introduce HukukBERT, the most comprehensive legal language model for Turkish, trained on a 18 GB cleaned legal corpus using a hybrid Domain-Adaptive Pre-Training (DAPT) methodology integrating Whole-Word Masking, Token…
  • Evaluated on a novel Legal Cloze Test benchmark -- a masked legal term prediction task designed for Turkish court decisions -- HukukBERT achieves state-of-the-art performance with 84.40\% Top-1 accuracy, substantially outperforming existing…

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Evaluated on a novel Legal Cloze Test benchmark -- a masked legal term prediction task designed for Turkish court decisions -- HukukBERT achieves state-of-the-art performance with 84.40\% Top-1 accuracy, substantially outperforming existing…

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy, top-1 accuracy

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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