Temporal Decay of Co-Citation Predictability: A 20-Year Statute Retrieval Benchmark from 396M Ukrainian Court Citations
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Temporal Decay of Co-Citation Predictability: A 20-Year Statute Retrieval Benchmark from 396M Ukrainian Court Citations
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 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 this https URL.
| Comments: | 12 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables. Dataset: this https URL |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR) |
| ACM classes: | H.3.3; I.2.7 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.17639 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.17639v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.17639
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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