Temporal Decay of Co-Citation Predictability: A 20-Year Statute Retrieval Benchmark from 396M Ukrainian Court Citations
Volodymyr Ovcharov
TL;DR
This study evaluates the stability of co-citation patterns in Ukrainian legal citations over 20 years, revealing significant temporal decay and its underlying semantic shifts, with a publicly available benchmark dataset.
Contribution
It introduces UA-StatuteRetrieval, a comprehensive benchmark for measuring co-citation predictability over time in legal documents, and analyzes the decay mechanisms in citation patterns.
Findings
Co-citation predictability declines significantly over 20 years.
Decay varies across legal domains, with civil law showing more degradation.
Semantic drift analysis explains part of the decay in citation predictability.
Abstract
Co-citation structure is widely assumed to provide stable retrieval signal in legal information systems. We test this assumption longitudinally by constructing UA-StatuteRetrieval, a benchmark that measures co-citation predictability across 20 annual snapshots (2007-2026) of 396 million codex citations from 101 million Ukrainian court decisions. Using a leave-one-out protocol over the full bipartite citation graph, we find that Adamic-Adar MRR declines 33% on a fixed set of articles (from 0.43 to 0.29) and 47% under a train/test temporal split (from 0.51 to 0.27) confirming genuine temporal decay rather than compositional shift or evaluation artifact. The decay is non-uniform: criminal procedure maintains stable co-citation patterns (MRR ~0.40), while civil law degrades from 0.35 to 0.15, coinciding with the 2017 judicial reform. Hub articles (>100K citations) resist decay, but…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Code & Models
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.