Pioneering Legal AI for Türkiye: NewMind AI Honored with Best Paper Award at EuroHPC User Days 2025

We are proud to announce that our paper, “Tailoring AI for Turkish Law: Domain-Specific Fine-Tuning of Small Language Models for Legal Expertise,” received the Best Paper Award at the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) User Days 2025, held on 30 September – 1 October 2025 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

This award marks an important milestone in our mission to advance specialized, resource-efficient AI for Türkiye’s legal sector.

Our Breakthrough in Legal AI

In our research, we demonstrated that small, fine-tuned language models (SLMs) can achieve expert-level performance in Turkish law while using resources far more efficiently than large proprietary systems. By fine-tuning Meta-Llama 3.1 8B Instruct with curated datasets across ten sub-domains—Tax, Labor, Data Protection (KVKK), Competition, Energy, Healthcare, Capital Markets, Environmental, Land & Zoning, and Intellectual Property—we achieved substantial improvements in semantic understanding, reasoning, and task-specific accuracy compared to the base model.

Key innovations include:

• Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT): Leveraging LoRA/QLoRA methods to achieve high performance with minimal overhead.
• HPC-powered training: Efficient training runs on the EuroHPC Karolina supercomputer.
• Synthetic data pipeline: Generator–critic–fuser workflow for creating high-quality, domain-specific Turkish legal datasets.
• Comprehensive evaluation: Multi-layered benchmarking (lexical, semantic, and AI-judge metrics) to measure practical legal performance.

Why This Matters for Türkiye

Our work contributes directly to Türkiye’s National AI Strategy and broader goals of digital sovereignty. By developing AI tools tailored to Turkish law, we provide a reliable alternative to foreign, general-purpose systems that often lack jurisdictional accuracy.

With these models, we are enabling:

• Legal professionals to accelerate contract review, compliance, and legal research.
• Financial institutions to strengthen regulatory monitoring and risk management.
• Public administration to modernize citizen services and policy analysis.

Open Research, Practical Impact

We are committed to open and transparent research. Our award-winning paper, authored by Özgür Uğur, Mahmut Çimen, Rumeysa Güllüce, Musa Yılmaz, and Özay Ezerceli, is published in Procedia Computer Science (Elsevier, Open Access) and is freely accessible here:

Read the full paper on ScienceDirect

To support further research and development, we are also sharing selected resources on Hugging Face:

• Model Collection
• Dataset

These resources make our findings accessible to researchers, practitioners, and enterprises, contributing to building a broader ecosystem of domain-specific AI for Turkish law.

What Comes Next

Building on this award-winning research, we will:

• Train a multi-domain “generalist expert” legal model using combined datasets.
• Advance retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines for fact-grounded, cite-ready outputs.
• Elevate our evaluation process with “Mezura” — a Hugging Face benchmark platform integrating systematic human expert reviews, setting a new gold standard in AI assessment.

We are actively collaborating with GSI Law Firm, SMEs, and public institutions in pilot programs designed to validate and refine our technology in real-world legal workflows.

About EuroHPC

The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is Europe’s flagship program advancing high-performance computing and AI research. The AI Factory Large Scale Call supports projects of exceptional technical and strategic importance to European technological sovereignty.

For more details on the EuroHPC User Days 2025 awards, see the official announcement by EuroHPC: EuroHPC Press Release

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