The patent retrieval task in the fourth NTCIR workshop

Abstract

This paper describes the Patent Retrieval Task in the Fourth NTCIR Workshop, and the test collections produced in this task. We perform the invalidity search task, in which each participant group searches a patent collection for the patents that can invalidate the demand in an existing claim. We also perform the automatic patent map generation task, in which the patents associated with a specific topic are organized in a multi-dimensional matrix.

Patent Retrieval

“…Work in this domain has been encouraged through evaluation campaigns, first through the NII 10 Test Collection for IR Systems (NTCIR) [57,60,93,145,146], and later through the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) (for the chemical domain [129]) and continuing at the moment of writing this review, through the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) [156,157,158,161].…”

Effects of Language and Topic Size in Patent IR: An Empirical Study

“…After initial experiments with manually evaluated topics, the Ntcir organizers moved to extracting relevance judgments from search reports. Later, in the work done by Fujii et al [4], relevance judgements obtained from citation records are compared with judgements inferred from patent classification codes, showing considerably different ranking results, but without providing any insight as to which one may be better.…”

CLEF-IP 2009: Retrieval Experiments in the Intellectual Property Domain

“…For example, a B1 document of a patent granted by the Epo contains, among other, the title, the description, and the claims in three languages (English, German, French), but it usually does not contain an abstract, while an A2 document contains the original patent application (in one language) but no citation information except the one provided by the applicant. 5 The Clef Ip collection was delivered to the participants as is , without joining the documents related to the same patent into one document. Since the objective of a search are patents (identi ed by patent numbers, without kind code), it is up to the participants to collate multiple retrieved documents for a single patent into one result.…”

“…Although there is important previous academic research work on patent retrieval (see for example the Acm Sigir 2000 Workshop [9] or more recently the Ntcir workshop series [5], there was little work involving non English European Languages and participation by European groups was low. Clef Ip grew out of desire to promote such European research work and also to encourage academic use of a large clean collection of patents being made available to researchers by Matrixware (through the Information Retrieval Facility).…”