kaos-citations 0.1.0a1

Structured, high-performance citation identification and extraction. Text in, typed Pydantic Citation records out with provenance + Bluebook modifiers. 60 kinds across legal, financial, accounting, and identifier domains. Pure-Python, fully offline, deterministic, Rust-backed matching.

kaos-citations

Part of Kelvin Agentic OS (KAOS) — open agentic infrastructure for legal work, built by 273 Ventures. See the full KAOS package map for the rest of the stack.

Structured, high-performance citation identification and extraction. Text in, typed Citation records out — frozen Pydantic models with raw / normalized / span provenance, Bluebook modifiers (signal, pin_cite, parenthetical, weight, subsequent_history, stable cite_id cross-references), and family-specific structured fields (volume / reporter / page / year / court / case_name; CFR title + section; SEC filing form; ASC topic-subtopic-section; etc.).

Pure-Python, fully offline, deterministic, Rust-backed matching, ~5× faster than eyecite on the SCOTUS corpus we benchmark against. Two runtime deps (kaos-core + kaos-nlp-core) — no httpx, no eyecite, no Python re-module imports.

60 supported kinds across four domains:

• Legal (25 kinds): case law (federal + state), U.S. Code, CFR, Federal Register, U.S. Constitution, Federal Rules + USSG, IRS guidance, Treasury Regs, executive actions, public laws + bills + reports + Cong. Rec., Restatements, Uniform Acts + Model Codes, agency adjudications + manuals, AG/OLC opinions, bar ethics, internet
  • archive URLs
• Financial (19 kinds): SEC filings + releases + staff guidance + named regulations (Reg. S-X / S-K / G / AB / M / FD / BTR / S-T), FINRA (rules / notices / disciplinary), exchange rules (NYSE / Nasdaq / Cboe / MSRB / OCC), banking (Fed Reserve / FDIC / OCC / CFPB / NCUA), Basel, CFTC, NAIC, FFIEC call reports, FATF / IOSCO
• Accounting (13 kinds): FASB ASC + ASU + legacy (FAS / FIN / FSP / EITF / CON / APB / ARB), PCAOB, AICPA, IFRS family (IFRS / IAS / IFRIC / SIC), IAASB, IESBA, GASB, FASAB, government audit (OMB / GAO / Yellow Book), NAIC SAP, sustainability frameworks (GRI / SASB / TCFD / ISSB / ESRS)
• Identifier (3 kinds): DOI, PubMed, arXiv (opt-in)

Identification + extraction only. Citation resolution (URL building, body fetching) and claim verification belong to the rest of the KAOS stack (kaos-source, kaos-web, kaos-llm-core's Cited[T], kaos-agents).

Architecture

Identification and extraction route through kaos-nlp-core's Rust+PyO3 primitives. There is no Python re module and no third-party tokenizer in the runtime path:

• MultiPatternMatcher (Aho-Corasick) over reporter spellings — one linear pass identifies every reporter token candidate.
• RegexMatcher (Rust regex crate) for per-family tail patterns (volume / page / pin cite / parenthetical, etc.).
• PunktTokenizer with the bundled legal model (~27,000 abbreviations) for sentence-boundary anchoring during Bluebook signal binding and string-cite grouping.
• FstSet for known-vocabulary lookups — reporters, courts, case-name abbreviations, journals, statute reporters, US states.
• Tokenizer for word-level operations.

Reporter / court / journal / case-name-abbreviation data is vendored under kaos_citations/data/ from the Free Law Project's reporters_db and courts_db (BSD-2). The full upstream license texts are preserved in LICENSE.vendored. kaos- citations consumes the JSON data only — no upstream Python code is imported at runtime.

Install

uv add kaos-citations
# or
pip install kaos-citations

kaos-citations requires Python 3.13 or newer.

Quick start

from kaos_citations import extract_citations

text = (
    "The court held that 17 CFR 240.10b-5(b) applies to insider "
    "trading, citing Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). "
    "See also U.S. Const. amend. I."
)

for c in extract_citations(text):
    print(f"  [{c.kind:<10}] {c.normalized!r:<30}  span={c.span}")

  [cfr       ] '17 CFR 240.10b-5(b)'           span=(20, 39)
  [case      ] '347 U.S. 483 (1954)'           span=(104, 116)
  [const     ] 'U.S. Const. amend. I'          span=(134, 154)

The base install handles every citation family — there are no extras-gated extractors. Filter with extract_citations(text, kinds=...):

extract_citations(text, kinds=("case", "cfr"))   # only case + CFR
extract_citations(text, kinds=("statute",))      # only U.S.C. / state codes

raw vs normalized vs span

For most citation families raw == text[span[0]:span[1]] == normalized. Two exceptions to know about:

• Case citations: span covers only the volume-reporter-page anchor (347 U.S. 483), matching eyecite's contract. normalized reconstructs the canonical vol reporter page (year) form (347 U.S. 483 (1954)), pulling the year from a date parenthetical that sits outside span.
• Citations with normalised reporters / spacing: raw preserves the exact source spelling (e.g. 347 U. S. 483); normalized rewrites to the Bluebook canonical (347 U.S. 483).

When you need the exact source bytes, use text[c.span[0]:c.span[1]]. When you need a stable, reporter-canonical string, use c.normalized.

Concepts

Concept	What it is
Citation	Frozen Pydantic discriminated-union over 60 citation kinds. Every variant carries raw / normalized / span / source_uri / cite_id plus family-specific structured fields, plus Bluebook modifiers on the base class (signal, pin_cite, pin_cite_kind, parenthetical, parenthetical_kind, weight, back_ref, string_cite_group, subsequent_history).
extract_citations(text, *, kinds=None, source_uri=None)	Top-level dispatcher. Returns list[Citation] in source order. Pure-function, fully offline, deterministic.
KaosCitationsSettings	ModuleSettings subclass — empty at this release. Reserved for future configuration via the standard kaos-* env / context channels.
MCP tools	kaos-citations-extract (bulk), kaos-citations-validate (single citation), kaos-citations-doctor (diagnostic). All read-only, no network. Register via register_citations_tools(runtime).

Citation kinds

Pass any of these as elements of the kinds= filter. The full per-family taxonomy with canonical examples and structured fields lives in docs/CITATION_TAXONOMY.md.

kind	Domain	Example
case	Legal	Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
case_short	Legal	Brown, 347 U.S. at 495
id	Legal	Id. at 495
supra	Legal	Smith, supra note 12, at 45
case_ref	Legal	Roe at 240
journal	Legal	94 Yale L.J. 247 (1985)
cfr	Legal	17 C.F.R. § 240.10b-5
statute	Legal	42 U.S.C. § 1983
fed_register	Legal	88 Fed. Reg. 12,345 (Mar. 1, 2023)
const	Legal	U.S. Const. amend. I
fed_rule	Legal	Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(c)
ussg	Legal	U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1(a)(1)
treas_reg	Legal	Treas. Reg. § 1.501(c)(3)-1
irs_guidance	Legal	Rev. Rul. 78-189, Notice 2020-32
exec_action	Legal	Exec. Order No. 13,769, Proc. 9844
public_law	Legal	Pub. L. No. 111-148, 124 Stat. 119
legislative	Legal	H.R. 3590, 111th Cong. (2009)
restatement	Legal	Restatement (Second) of Torts § 402A (1965)
uniform_act	Legal	U.C.C. § 2-207
agency_adj	Legal	In re Boeing Co., 369 N.L.R.B. No. 8 (2020)
agency_manual	Legal	MPEP § 2106, TMEP § 1202.04
legal_opinion	Legal	42 Op. O.L.C. 1 (2018)
bar_ethics	Legal	ABA Comm. on Ethics, Formal Op. 477 (2017)
internet	Legal	https://example.com/page
archive	Legal	https://web.archive.org/web/.../...
sec_filing	Financial	Form 10-K, Apple Inc. (2023)
sec_release	Financial	Securities Act Release No. 33-11070
sec_staff	Financial	Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 121
sec_reg	Financial	Reg. S-X, Reg. S-K
finra_rule	Financial	FINRA Rule 2010
finra_notice	Financial	FINRA Reg. Notice 22-08
finra_disciplinary	Financial	FINRA Discip. Proc. 2018058950501
exchange_rule	Financial	NYSE Rule 123, Nasdaq Rule 5635
fed_reserve_reg	Financial	Reg. K, Reg. T
fed_reserve_letter	Financial	SR Letter 22-3, CA Letter 21-7
fdic_doc	Financial	FDIC FIL-22-2022
occ_doc	Financial	OCC Bull. 2020-26
cfpb_doc	Financial	CFPB Bull. 2022-04
ncua_letter	Financial	NCUA Letter 22-CU-04
basel	Financial	Basel III Framework, BCBS 189
cftc_doc	Financial	CFTC Letter No. 22-04
naic	Financial	NAIC Model Bull. 2023-1
intl_finance	Financial	FATF Recommendation 10, IOSCO Final Report
ffiec_call	Financial	FFIEC Call Report Schedule RC-R
asc	Accounting	ASC 606-10-25-2
asu	Accounting	ASU 2016-13
legacy_fasb	Accounting	FAS 109, FIN 48, EITF 02-13
pcaob	Accounting	PCAOB AS 2410, PCAOB Release No. 2022-002
aicpa	Accounting	AICPA SAS 145, AICPA Code of Professional Conduct § 1.130
ifrs	Accounting	IFRS 15, IAS 36, IFRIC 23
iaasb	Accounting	ISA 315 (Revised 2019)
iesba	Accounting	IESBA Code § 110.1
gasb	Accounting	GASB Statement No. 87
fasab	Accounting	SFFAS 6
govt_audit	Accounting	OMB Circular A-133, GAO Yellow Book § 6.30
naic_acct	Accounting	NAIC SSAP No. 62R
sustainability	Accounting	GRI 305, SASB FN-CB-410a.1, TCFD Recommendation 2(a)
doi	Identifier	10.1038/nature12373
pmid	Identifier	PMID: 24571878
arxiv	Identifier	arXiv:2305.10403 (opt-in)

arxiv is opt-in — academic preprints are rarely cited in legal / financial / accounting writing, so the dispatcher excludes them by default to avoid noise. Add it explicitly to the filter when you want it:

extract_citations(text, kinds=("arxiv", "doi", "pmid"))

CLI

kaos-citations ships a single entry-point script, kaos-citations-serve, that boots an MCP server exposing the three read-only tools (kaos-citations-extract, kaos-citations-validate, kaos-citations-doctor) and the kaos-citations://kinds resource:

kaos-citations-serve                  # stdio (for Claude Code, Codex, ...)
kaos-citations-serve --http --port 8765

Or via the kaos-mcp manager: kaos-mcp serve --module citations.

Compatibility & status

Aspect
Python	3.13, 3.14 (informational matrix entries for 3.14t free-threaded and 3.15-dev)
OS	Linux, macOS, Windows (pure-Python wheel; no native code)
Maturity	Alpha. The public API is documented in kaos_citations.__all__ — the typed Citation discriminated union, extract_citations, the per-family extract_* functions, and the post-process passes.
Stability policy	Pre-1.0: minor bumps may change behaviour. Every change is documented in CHANGELOG.md. The MCP tool surface and the KAOS_CITATIONS_* environment-variable namespace are public API.
Test coverage	460+ unit + benchmark tests across the parsers, post-process passes, MCP tools, MCP resource, and corpus benchmarks.
Type checker	Validated with ty, Astral's Python type checker.

Companion packages

kaos-citations is one of the packages in the Kelvin Agentic OS. The broader stack:

Package	Layer	What it does
kaos-core	Core	Foundational runtime, MCP-native types, registries, execution engine, VFS
kaos-content	Core	Typed document AST: Block/Inline, provenance, views
kaos-mcp	Bridge	FastMCP server, kaos management CLI, MCP resource templates
kaos-pdf	Extraction	PDF → AST with provenance
kaos-web	Extraction	Web extraction, browser automation, search, domain intelligence
kaos-office	Extraction	DOCX / PPTX / XLSX readers + writers to AST
kaos-tabular	Extraction	DuckDB-powered SQL analytics
kaos-source	Data	Government + financial data connectors (Federal Register, eCFR, EDGAR, GovInfo, PACER, GLEIF)
kaos-llm-client	LLM	Multi-provider LLM transport
kaos-llm-core	LLM	Typed LLM programming (Signatures, Programs, Optimizers)
kaos-nlp-core	Primitives (Rust)	High-performance NLP primitives
kaos-nlp-transformers	ML	Dense embeddings + retrieval
kaos-graph	Primitives (Rust)	Graph algorithms + RDF/SPARQL
kaos-ml-core	Primitives (Rust)	Classical ML on the document AST
kaos-citations	Legal	Legal citation extraction, resolution, verification
kaos-agents	Agentic	Agent runtime, memory, recipes
kaos-reference	Sample	Reference module for module authors

Packages depend on kaos-core; everything else is opt-in. Mix and match the ones you need.

Development

git clone https://github.com/273v/kaos-citations
cd kaos-citations
uv sync --group dev

Install pre-commit hooks (recommended — they run the same checks as CI on every commit, scoped to staged files):

uvx pre-commit install
uvx pre-commit run --all-files     # one-time full sweep

Manual QA commands (the same set CI runs):

uv run ruff format --check kaos_citations tests
uv run ruff check kaos_citations tests
uv run ty check kaos_citations tests
uv run pytest -m "not live and not network and not slow and not integration"

Build from source

uv build
uv pip install dist/*.whl

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. By contributing you certify the Developer Certificate of Origin v1.1 — sign every commit with git commit -s. Please open an issue before starting on a non-trivial change so we can align on scope.

Security

For security issues, please do not file a public issue. Report privately via GitHub Private Vulnerability Reporting or email [e-mail]. See SECURITY.md for the full disclosure policy.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE.

Copyright 2026 273 Ventures LLC. Built for kelvin.legal.