Simple pre and post processing strategies for patent searching in CLEF intellectual property track 2009

Abstract

The objective of the 2009 CLEF-IP Track was to find documents that constitute prior art for a given patent. We explored a wide range of simple pre-processing and post-processing strategies, using Mean Average Precision (MAP) for evaluation purposes. Once determined the best document representation, we tuned a classical Information Retrieval engine in order to perform the retrieval step. Finally, we explored two different post-processing strategies. In our experiments, using the complete IPC codes for filtering purposes led to greater improvements than using 4-digits IPC codes. The second post-processing strategy was to exploit the citations of retrieved patents in order to boost scores of cited patents. Combining all selected strategies, we computed optimal runs that reached a MAP of 0.122 for the training set, and a MAP of 0.129 for the official 2009 CLEF-IP XL set. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.