Nepal's New AI Answers Legal Questions in Plain Language

Getting legal information in Nepal is genuinely hard. Laws are written in dense, old-fashioned language, official resources are scattered, and rumors about what's legal or not spread easily. So a team of five researchers built an AI assistant named NepKANUN that answers legal questions in ordinary Nepali, the way you'd ask a friend who happens to know the law.

The trick is a technique called RAG, which stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation — in plain terms, letting AI look things up before it answers. Instead of relying only on what it memorized during training, the system first searches a curated library of Nepali legal documents, then writes an answer based on what it found. The team also trained it on a custom set of high-quality question-and-answer pairs, then had human legal experts review the results. Using a standard scoring method that compares AI answers to correct ones, it earned 0.82 for simple questions, 0.77 for moderate ones, and 0.71 for complex ones — strong for a specialized, low-resource language, but clearly better on easy questions than hard ones.

Why does this matter beyond Nepal? Legal help is expensive almost everywhere, and it's scarcest in countries with fewer lawyers and thinner digital records. A tool that turns "what are my rights if my landlord keeps my deposit?" into a clear answer in seconds could save people real money and hours of confusion — and could point the way for other languages and countries with similar gaps.

The honest catch: this is a research paper, not a product. There's no public app, no pricing, no launch date. The accuracy drop on complex questions matters too — the harder your legal problem, the less you should trust it. And even a good AI answer isn't a lawyer; it can't represent you in court or take responsibility if it's wrong. Treat it as a starting point for understanding, not a final word.