CORE-KG: An LLM-Driven Knowledge Graph Construction Framework for Human Smuggling Networks

Abstract: Human smuggling networks are increasingly adaptive and difficult to analyze. Legal case documents offer valuable insights but are unstructured, lexically dense, and filled with ambiguous or shifting references-posing challenges for automated knowledge graph (KG) construction. Existing KG methods often rely on static templates and lack coreference resolution, while recent LLM-based approaches frequently produce noisy, fragmented graphs due to hallucinations, and duplicate nodes caused by a lack of guided extraction. We propose CORE-KG, a modular framework for building interpretable KGs from legal texts. It uses a two-step pipeline: (1) type-aware coreference resolution via sequential, structured LLM prompts, and (2) entity and relationship extraction using domain-guided instructions, built on an adapted GraphRAG framework. CORE-KG reduces node duplication by 33.28%, and legal noise by 38.37% compared to a GraphRAG-based baseline-resulting in cleaner and more coherent graph structures. These improvements make CORE-KG a strong foundation for analyzing complex criminal networks.