IES-Rafael-Alberti/spanish-cybersecurity-law-qa

Spanish Cybersecurity Law QA

Question answering over Spanish cybersecurity legislation, with every answer grounded in literal evidence from the official consolidated texts published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE).

Each question comes with a reference answer and the exact provisions that support it: norm, article, the BOE block identifier, the literal excerpt and short key quotes that can be matched automatically. The dataset is designed to grow over time with new questions and new norms, and to stay maintainable as the law changes: every piece of evidence records which version of the law it was taken from.

Questions, answers and evidence are in Spanish. Field names and documentation are in English.

Uses

• Evaluating retrieval (RAG and search systems): does the system retrieve the provisions needed to answer each question?
• Evaluating grounded answers: does a generated answer match the reference and cite the right provisions?
• Fine-tuning: question, answer and supporting excerpt triples in Spanish legal language.

This dataset is not legal advice. Answers reflect the consolidated texts as of law_version_date and may become outdated.

Dataset structure

Two configurations, each with a single test split.

questions

Field	Type	Description
id	int	Stable numeric identifier. Removed questions keep their number; it is never reused
question	string	The question, in Spanish
answer	string	Reference answer in Spanish, citing the relevant provisions
evidence	list	Provisions needed to answer the question. All evidence items are required
evidence[].alternatives	list	Places in the law where that piece of evidence can be found. Any one alternative is enough (for example, when a regulation repeats an article of the law it develops)
alternatives[].norm_id	string	BOE identifier of the norm (e.g. BOE-A-2021-1192); see the norms configuration
alternatives[].citation	string	Human-readable citation (e.g. RD 43/2021, art. 7.1)
alternatives[].boe_block_id	string	Identifier of the block in the BOE consolidated text (a7 is article 7; ai-2 is annex II). Links as https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id={norm_id}#{boe_block_id}
alternatives[].block_version_date	string	Date from which the version of that block used here is in force (YYYY-MM-DD)
alternatives[].excerpt	string	Literal text of the unit of the norm containing the evidence: the whole numbered paragraph, reinforcement or requirement block of a security measure, the measure's application by level, or a glossary entry. When that unit is too long, the list item that contains the evidence, preceded by the sentences that introduce it, with […] marking omitted items. Table evidence keeps the header and the row. Paragraphs are separated by a blank line
alternatives[].quotes	list of strings	Short literal key quotes, all contained in excerpt, for automatic matching
norm_ids	list of strings	All norms cited by the question's evidence
law_version_date	string	Date of the consolidated texts the question was built and verified against (YYYY-MM-DD)
provenance	struct	batch, created_with, verified_by, added_in and revised_in (dataset versions), and review_count, the number of independent human reviews; see Provenance

Example (abridged):

{
  "id": 13,
  "question": "Una empresa acaba de ser designada operador de servicios esenciales. ¿Cuánto tiempo tiene para nombrar a su responsable de la seguridad de la información? Si más adelante esa persona deja el puesto, ¿en cuánto tiempo hay que comunicarlo?",
  "answer": "Tres meses desde su designación como operador de servicios esenciales (art. 7.1 del RD 43/2021). Los nombramientos y ceses posteriores se comunican a la autoridad competente en el plazo de un mes desde que se producen (art. 7.2). ...",
  "evidence": [
    {"alternatives": [{"norm_id": "BOE-A-2021-1192", "citation": "RD 43/2021, art. 7.1",
                       "boe_block_id": "a7", "block_version_date": "2021-01-29",
                       "excerpt": "1. Los operadores de servicios esenciales designarán ... será de tres meses desde su designación como operador de servicios esenciales.",
                       "quotes": ["el plazo para llevar a cabo dicha designación será de tres meses"]}]},
    {"alternatives": [{"norm_id": "BOE-A-2021-1192", "citation": "RD 43/2021, art. 7.2", "...": "..."}]}
  ],
  "norm_ids": ["BOE-A-2021-1192"],
  "law_version_date": "2026-10-26",
  "provenance": {"batch": "iesra-ce-ciber-2026-27", "created_with": "claude-opus-5-5",
                 "verified_by": "iesra-ce-ciber-2026-27", "added_in": "1.0", "revised_in": null,
                 "review_count": 2}
}

norms

One row per norm cited in questions.

Field	Type	Description
norm_id	string	BOE identifier
short_name	string	Short name used in citations (e.g. RD 311/2022)
common_name	string	Usual name, when there is one (e.g. Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (ENS))
title	string	Official title
rank	string	Rank of the norm (Ley, Real Decreto-ley, Real Decreto…)
official_number	string	Official number (e.g. 311/2022)
date	string	Date of the norm (YYYY-MM-DD)
eli	string	European Legislation Identifier URL
consolidated_url	string	Consolidated text on the BOE website
consolidated_as_of	string	Date the consolidated text was retrieved for this dataset
repealed	bool	Whether the norm was repealed at that date

Current contents

Norm	Questions citing it
Real Decreto 311/2022, Esquema Nacional de Seguridad (BOE-A-2022-7191)	24
Real Decreto-ley 12/2018, de seguridad de las redes y sistemas de información (BOE-A-2018-12257)	11
Real Decreto 43/2021, que desarrolla el Real Decreto-ley 12/2018 (BOE-A-2021-1192)	9
Ley 8/2011, de protección de las infraestructuras críticas (BOE-A-2011-7630)	9
Real Decreto 704/2011, Reglamento de protección de las infraestructuras críticas (BOE-A-2011-8849)	5

50 questions and 73 evidence items: 28 questions need one piece of evidence, 21 need two and one needs three. 8 questions combine two norms, and 12 evidence items have more than one valid location.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

questions = load_dataset("IES-Rafael-Alberti/spanish-cybersecurity-law-qa", "questions", split="test")
norms = load_dataset("IES-Rafael-Alberti/spanish-cybersecurity-law-qa", "norms", split="test")

To make results reproducible, pin a version with revision="v1.0".

Matching evidence in retrieved text

An evidence item counts as retrieved when, for at least one of its alternatives, all its quotes appear in the retrieved text. A question is fully supported when all its evidence items are retrieved. Before comparing, normalise both texts: lowercase, collapse all whitespace (including line breaks) into a single space, and replace typographic quotes (“ ” « » ‘ ’) with straight ones.

TRANSLATION = str.maketrans({"“": '"', "”": '"', "«": '"', "»": '"', "‘": "'", "’": "'"})

def normalise(text):
    return " ".join(text.translate(TRANSLATION).lower().split())

def supported(question, retrieved_text):
    text = normalise(retrieved_text)
    return all(
        any(all(normalise(q) in text for q in alt["quotes"]) for alt in ev["alternatives"])
        for ev in question["evidence"]
    )

Quotes are deliberately short, so the result does not depend on how a system splits the law into chunks.

Keeping up with legal changes

# Questions that depend on a given norm
affected = questions.filter(lambda r: "BOE-A-2018-12257" in r["norm_ids"])

A question is affected by a legal change when, for some evidence item, every alternative points to a block that has been repealed or has a version in force after its block_version_date. Comparing excerpt with the current text of the block shows whether the change alters the answer.

Dataset creation

Source data

The consolidated texts of the five norms above, as published by the BOE, retrieved on 2026-10-26 through the BOE open data API. Spanish legislation is not subject to copyright (article 13 of the Spanish Copyright Act, Texto refundido de la Ley de Propiedad Intelectual).

Generation and verification

• Synthetic generation. Questions, reference answers and evidence were generated with Claude Opus 5.5 from the consolidated texts. Questions are written as realistic situations rather than copies of the legal wording, and many require combining several provisions, a law and its implementing regulation, or a rule and its exception.
• Automatic checks. Every key quote was checked against the BOE text. Block identifiers and version dates were taken from the official XML, and excerpts were extracted from the consolidated text and reviewed by hand.
• Human verification. Each question was assigned to two different teams of students, who reviewed it independently: the question, the answer, every citation and excerpt against the BOE, and whether other provisions also answer it. 43 questions received both reviews and 7 received one (provenance.review_count). Both reviews reached the same verdict for 26 of the 43 questions.
• Resolution. The course teacher reviewed every question and every comment from the teams. Eleven questions were corrected as a result: seven answers were completed or made more precise (4, 5, 10, 14, 22, 25 and 37), two pieces of evidence gained an alternative location (2 and 14), one question gained a piece of evidence (9) and one was reworded (14). Excerpts that did not reflect the structure of the law were rebuilt (among them 18 and 41).

Provenance

Every row records the batch it belongs to (provenance.batch), the model that generated it, who verified it, and the dataset version in which it was added or last revised.

Batch	Questions	Description
iesra-ce-ciber-2026-27	1–50	Generated with Claude Opus 5.5 and verified by the students of the Curso de Especialización en Ciberseguridad en Entornos de las Tecnologías de la Información (Specialisation Course in Cybersecurity in IT Environments), IES Rafael Alberti (Cádiz, Spain), 2026-2027 cohort

Limitations

• Scope. Only Spanish state-level legislation on cybersecurity; currently five norms.
• Snapshot. Answers are correct as of law_version_date; check the BOE for later changes.
• Synthetic questions. They may not reflect the distribution of real user queries.
• Size. 50 questions are enough for evaluation and analysis, not for training large models from scratch.

License

CC BY 4.0. The legal texts quoted in excerpt and quotes are not subject to copyright.

Changelog

Version	Date	Changes
1.0	2026-11-08	First release: 50 questions on five norms (batch iesra-ce-ciber-2026-27)

Citation

@misc{iesra_spanish_cybersecurity_law_qa,
  title     = {Spanish Cybersecurity Law QA},
  author    = {{IES Rafael Alberti}},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/IES-Rafael-Alberti/spanish-cybersecurity-law-qa}
}