lex-au-search-index

Pre-built Qdrant vector index for hybrid dense + BM25 search over Australian Commonwealth legislation - download and query, no re-embedding or re-ingest required.

This is an output of lex-au-search run against the lex-au corpus. If you want to search AU legislation, download this and point the CLI at it.

Version: v0.5.0 - 534,335 chunks (sections, subsections, schedule clauses) across 3,073 Act records, embedded with snowflake/snowflake-arctic-embed-l (1024-dim, local ONNX, 512-token context). Corpus pinned at lex-au commit f0a89da4 (2026-08-30).

See github.com/cchew/lex-au-search for source code, CLI, and MCP server. See cchew/lex-au-search-embed-cache for the separate raw embedding cache the ingest pipeline itself uses to resume/skip re-embedding.

Quick example

Download the index and run the search server directly - no embedding model needed to browse:

from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
from qdrant_client import QdrantClient

path = snapshot_download(repo_id="cchew/lex-au-search-index", repo_type="dataset")
client = QdrantClient(path=f"{path}/qdrant_storage")

# Browse Act-level metadata with no query embedding required
hits, _ = client.scroll("legislation", limit=3, with_payload=True)
for h in hits:
    print(h.payload["act_name"], h.payload["frbr_uri"])

For real hybrid dense + BM25 search (search_legislation), clone lex-au-search, pip install -e ".[dev]", then:

lex-au-search serve --storage-dir /path/to/downloaded/qdrant_storage
# or: LEXAU_SEARCH_STORAGE=/path/to/downloaded/qdrant_storage lex-au-search mcp

What's in this dataset

A Qdrant local-mode storage directory (qdrant_storage/) with two collections:

• legislation (3,073 points) - one per Act: act_name, frbr_uri, year, as_at_date, section_count, schedule_clause_count.
• legislation_section (534,335 points) - one per chunk: 1024-dim dense vector (snowflake-arctic-embed-l) + BM25 sparse vector, payload act_name, frbr_uri, eid, provision_num, provision_type, heading, text (full chunk text), refs (cross-references).

On-disk size ~6.4 GB, dominated by legislation_section (vectors + full section text payload).

Known limits

• 9 of the source corpus's 3,082 Acts are absent: two Constitution Alteration referendum Acts (1906, 1909) and seven old amendment/repeal-only Acts whose AKN XML doesn't fit the <section>-based body shape the chunker extracts from, so they chunk to zero content. All are spent/minor Acts with no operative text of real search value - see lex-au-search's FUTURE.md for the full list.
• Qdrant's local/embedded mode keeps the full vector set resident in RAM and has no ANN index, so QdrantClient(path=...) construction itself is slow at this scale (multiple minutes to open, 534K+ points) - expected, not a bug. Fine for local CLI/MCP use; not suited to serving concurrent requests.
• No hosted search endpoint exists for this index - it's a downloadable artifact, not a live service.

Licence

CC BY 4.0. Source legislation is Crown copyright - Commonwealth of Australia; reproduction permitted for non-commercial and research purposes under the PSI Framework. The legislation_section payload carries substantial verbatim section text from that corpus, so this dataset inherits the same licence as cchew/lex-au rather than a separate one for "just the vectors."

What's built on this

• ClauseKit - LLM extraction of evaluatable rules (JSON Logic) from Acts, run claims against them grounded back to source clauses
• Act Alike - compare how terms are defined across Acts

Related

• github.com/cchew/lex-au-search - source code, CLI, MCP server
• cchew/lex-au - the underlying AKN 3.0 XML corpus this index was built from
• cchew/lex-au-search-embed-cache - the ingest pipeline's own resumable embed cache (different artifact, different audience)
• lex-au-graph - cross-reference graph and definition resolution across Acts