Workshop Description

The goal of this workshop is to foster research and development of the technology for patent corpus processing, by providing a forum in which researchers and practitioners can exchange and share their ideas, approaches, perspectives, and experiences from their work in progress.

The processing of intellectual property (IP) documents, including patents, is important in the scientific, business, and law communities. Much of the focus for patent and IP processing has been in the database and information retrieval communities, but not in the computational linguistics (CL) and natural language processing (NLP) communities.

In 2000, the first ACM SIGIR 2000 Workshop on Patent Retrieval was held. In this workshop, patent retrieval systems in use at EPO (European Patent Office) and JAPIO (Japanese Patent Information Organization) were introduced, and a number of issues related to patent retrieval (e.g., producing ontologies, cross-language retrieval, and evaluation methods) were proposed/discussed.

In 2001-2002, the NTCIR workshop (the National Institute of Informatics, Japan), which is a TREC-style evaluation forum for research and development on IR/NLP, first performed the patent retrieval task. Two years of Japanese patents (approximately 7M documents published in 1998-1999; 18GB) were used to evaluate mono/cross-lingual patent retrieval systems. In addition, approximately 17M Japanese/English parallel patent abstracts were used to evaluate the effectiveness of extracting translation lexicons.

Areas of Interest

Patent corpora are associated with a number of interesting characteristics, for which various CL/NLP techniques have promise for improving the quality of patent processing.

• multilinguality: the same/similar contents (i.e., inventions) are filed in different languages, for which machine translation, cross/multi-lingual retrieval, and translation extraction alleviate problems in accessing information in foreign languages.
• scalability: a huge amount of copora data is available and periodically produced, for which text summarization and natural language generation help produce understandable coherent condensed contents.
• complexity: since patents consist of overwhelmingly long sentences, parsing/chunking techniques help produce readable shorter fragments.
• classification: patents are manually categorized based on a specific classification system, such as IPC (international patent classification), which can be used for statistical classification methods.
• novelty/temprality/dynamism: new terms and concepts associated with inventions are periodically created, for which term extraction and ontology construction techniques help update lexical resources for patent processing.
• document structures: unlike newspaper articles, patents are structured with a number of specific fields (e.g., titles, abstracts, and claims). While conventional text segmentation techniques rely mainly on linguistic contents (e.g., lexical chains), structure analysis techniques (e.g., ones related to XML) are also crucial in the context of CL/NLP.
• applications: the above techniques can directly contribute to a number of applications, such as patent retrieval systems.

Preliminary Program

9:10-9:20	Welcome
9:20-9:50	A Patent Document Retrieval System Addressing Both Semantic and Syntactic Properties Liang Chen, Naoyuki Tokuda and Hisahiro Adachi
9:50-10:20	Intelligent patent analysis through the use of a neural network: experiment of multi-viewpoint analysis with the MultiSOM model Jean-Charles Lamirel, Shadi Al Shehabi, Martial Hoffmann and Claire Francois
10:20-10:40	Break
10:40-11:10	Overview of Patent Retrieval Task at NTCIR-3 Makoto Iwayama, Atsushi Fujii, Noriko Kando and Akihiko Takano
11:10-11:40	Pseudo Relevance Feedback Method based on Taylor Expansion of Retrieval Function in NTCIR-3 Patent Retrieval Task Kazuaki Kishida
11:40-12:10	Term Distillation in Patent Retrieval Hideo Itoh, Hiroko Mano and Yasushi Ogawa
12:10-13:30	Lunch
13:30-14:00	Can Text Analysis Tell us Something about Technology Progress? Khurshid Ahmad and AbdulMohsen Al-Thubaity
14:00-14:30	Patent Claim Processing for Readability - Structure Analysis and Term Explanation - Akihiro Shinmori, Manabu Okumura, Yuzo Marukawa and Makoto Iwayama
14:30-15:00	Natural Language Analysis of Patent Claims Svetlana Sheremetyeva
15:00-15:30	Wrap-up

Submission Information

Papers should be submitted electronically in Postscript or PDF format to: fujii@slis.tsukuba.ac.jp. Submissions should conform to the two-column format of ACL proceedings and should not exceed eight (8) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL-2003 style files, also available from the ACL-2003 website.

The subject line of the submission email should be "ACL2003 WORKSHOP PAPER SUBMISSION". As reviewing will be blind, the body of the paper should not include the names or affiliations of the authors. The following identification information should be sent in a separate email with the subject line "ACL2003 WORKSHOP ID PAGE":

Title: title of paper
Authors: list of all authors
Keywords: up to five topic keywords
Contact author: email address of author of record (for correspondence)
Abstract: abstract of paper (not more than 5 lines)

Important Dates

Submission deadline	18 April 2003
Acceptance notification	12 May 2003
Final version deadline	30 May 2003
Workshop date	12 July 2003

Workshop Chairs

Makoto Iwayama   Tokyo Institute of Technology / Hitachi Ltd., Japan
Atsushi Fujii   University of Tsukuba, Japan

Program Committee

Aitao Chen   University of California at Berkeley, USA
Hsin-Hsi Chen   National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Sumio Fujita   Patolis Corporation, Japan
Fredric Gey   University of California at Berkeley, USA
Preben Hansen   Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden
Toshihiro Kamishima   National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan
Noriko Kando   National Institute of Informatics, Japan
Jong-Hyeok Lee   Pohang University of Science & Technology, Korea
Mun-Kew Leong   Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
Liz Liddy   Syracuse University, USA
Isabelle Moulinier   Thomson Legal & Regulatory, R & D Group, USA
Manabu Okumura   Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Paul Thompson   Dartmouth College, USA

Contact Information

Link(s)

• NTCIR-4 Patent Retrieval Task