LexEval: A Comprehensive Chinese Legal Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing tasks and demonstrate considerable potential in the legal domain. However, legal applications demand high standards of accuracy, reliability, and fairness. Applying existing LLMs to legal systems without careful evaluation of their potential and limitations could pose significant risks in legal practice.To this end, we introduce a standardized comprehensive Chinese legal benchmark LexEval.This benchmark is notable in the following three aspects: (1) Ability Modeling: We propose a new taxonomy of legal cognitive abilities to organize different tasks. LexEval not only focuses on the ability of LLMs to apply fundamental legal knowledge but also dedicates efforts to examining the ethical issues involved in their application.We evaluated 38 open-source and commercial LLMs and obtained some interesting findings. The experiments and findings offer valuable insights into the challenges and potential solutions for developing Chinese legal systems and LLM evaluation pipelines.