Our paper PatentMatch: A Dataset for Matching Patent Claims & Prior Art by Julian Risch, Nicolas Alder, Christoph Hewel and Ralf Krestel has been accepted for publication at the 2nd Workshop on Patent Text Mining and Semantic Technologies (PatentSemTech) co-located with the 44th International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR).

A preprint can be accessed here. More information is on this web page.

Patent examiners need to solve a complex information retrieval task when they assess the novelty and inventive step of claims made in a patent application. Given a claim, they search for prior art, which comprises all relevant publicly available information. This time-consuming task requires a deep understanding of the respective technical domain and the patent-domain-specific language. For these reasons, we address the computer-assisted search for prior art by creating a training dataset for supervised machine learning called PatentMatch. It contains pairs of claims from patent applications and semantically corresponding text passages of different degrees from cited patent documents. Each pair has been labeled by technically-skilled patent examiners from the European Patent Office. Accordingly, the label indicates the degree of semantic correspondence (matching), i.e., whether the text passage is prejudicial to the novelty of the claimed invention or not. Preliminary experiments using a baseline system show that PatentMatch can indeed be used for training a binary text pair classifier and a dense passage retriever on this challenging information retrieval task. The dataset is available online: https://hpi.de/naumann/s/patentmatch.