Temporal Decay of Co-Citation Predictability: A 20-Year Statute Retrieval Benchmark from 396M Ukrainian Court Citations
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866911692405866496 |
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| author | Ovcharov, Volodymyr |
| author_facet | Ovcharov, Volodymyr |
| contents | 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 mid-frequency articles (1K-10K) -- the practical retrieval frontier lose half their predictability. A BM25 text baseline decays even faster (31%), and embedding drift analysis with E5-large reveals a 4.3% semantic shift in how articles are cited, providing a mechanistic explanation for the observed decay. The benchmark is released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/overthelex/ua-statute-retrieval. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17639 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Temporal Decay of Co-Citation Predictability: A 20-Year Statute Retrieval Benchmark from 396M Ukrainian Court Citations Ovcharov, Volodymyr Computation and Language Information Retrieval H.3.3; I.2.7 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 mid-frequency articles (1K-10K) -- the practical retrieval frontier lose half their predictability. A BM25 text baseline decays even faster (31%), and embedding drift analysis with E5-large reveals a 4.3% semantic shift in how articles are cited, providing a mechanistic explanation for the observed decay. The benchmark is released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/overthelex/ua-statute-retrieval. |
| title | Temporal Decay of Co-Citation Predictability: A 20-Year Statute Retrieval Benchmark from 396M Ukrainian Court Citations |
| topic | Computation and Language Information Retrieval H.3.3; I.2.7 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17639 |