Citation Grounding: Detecting and Reducing LLM Citation Hallucinations via Legal Citation Graphs
Large language models systematically hallucinate legal citations -- fabricating statute references, citing repealed provisions, and confusing jurisdictions -- yet no automated method exists to measure or reduce this behavior at scale. We propose citation grounding (CG), a metric that verifies LLM-generated legal citations against a ground-truth citation graph extracted from 100.8 million Ukrainian court decisions (502 million edges, 21,736 unique statute nodes). CG decomposes into three components -- citation precision (does the cited provision exist?), citation relevance (is it contextually ...