Patent retrieval experiments in the context of the CLEF IP track 2009

Abstract

At CLEF 2009 the University of Hildesheim submitted experiments for the new Intellectual Property Track. We focused on the main task of this track that aims at finding prior art for a specified patent. Our experiments were split up into one official German run as well as different additional runs using English and German terms. The submitted run was based on a simple baseline approach including stopword elimination, stemming and simple term queries. Furthermore, we investigated the significance of the International Patent Classification (IPC). During the experiments, different parts of a patent were used to construct the queries. In a first stage, only title and claims were included. In contrast, for the post runs we generated a more complex boolean query, which combined terms of the title, claims, description and the IPC classes. The results made clear that using the IPC codes can particularly increase the recall of a patent retrieval system. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.