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Limitations of Automatic Patent IR

A Plea for More Interactivity

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Abstract

In the last years, the interest of the IR-community in patent retrieval has risen. Various experiments have been undertaken and the problems of the field experienced in-depth. Results show that the paramount steps in the patent retrieval process are difficult to automate. This paper gives an overview over the methods that have been tested in the domain including their results and promotes a complementary, more interactive approach to patent retrieval. At last, promising areas for future research are described.

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Notes

  1. http://www.clef-initiative.eu/.

  2. http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/index-en.html.

  3. Prior art is, in general, all the knowledge that existed prior to the relevant filing or priority date of a patent application, whether it existed by way of written or oral disclosure [64].

  4. The are no exact numbers for the quantity of patents available. Even though estimates range between 50 and 90 million documents, they still give an impression of the magnitude that has to be dealt with.

  5. Lopez & Romary achieved a higher MAP score in CLEF 2009 and CLEF 2010 by using the citations that were the basis for the relevance assessment. Since this exploitation must lead to better results, the approach cannot be taken seriously in a fair comparison.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Science and Natural Language Processing, University of Hildesheim, Marienburger Höhe 22, 31141, Hildesheim, Germany

    Julia J. Jürgens & Christa Womser-Hacker

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  1. Julia J. Jürgens
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  2. Christa Womser-Hacker
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Correspondence to Julia J. Jürgens.

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Jürgens, J.J., Womser-Hacker, C. Limitations of Automatic Patent IR. Datenbank Spektrum 14, 5–17 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13222-014-0149-y

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