Query generation techniques for patent prior-art search in multiple languages

Abstract

Patent prior-art search is an necessary step to ensure that no previous similar disclosures were made before granting an patent. The task is to identify all relevant information which may invalidate the originality of a claim of a patent application. Using the whole patent or extracting high indicative terms to form a query reduces the search burden on the user. To date, There are no large-scale experiments conducted specifically for evaluating query generation techniques used in patent prior-art search in multiple languages. In the following paper, we firstly introduced seven methods for generating patent queries for ranking. Then a large-scale experimental evaluation was carried out on the CLEF-IP 2009 multilingual dataset in English, French and German. A detail comparison of the different methods in terms of performance and efficiency has been performed in addition to the use of full-length documents as queries in the patent search. The results show that some methods, work well in information retrieval in general, fail to achieve the same effectiveness in the patent search. Different methods demonstrated distinct performance w.r.t query and document languages. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.