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Evaluating Information Retrieval in the Intellectual Property Domain: The Clef–Ip Campaign

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Current Challenges in Patent Information Retrieval

Part of the book series: The Information Retrieval Series ((INRE,volume 29))

Abstract

The Clef–Ip track ran for the first time within the Clef 2009 campaign. The purpose of the track was twofold: (a) to encourage and facilitate research in the area of patent retrieval by providing a large clean data set for experimentation; (b) to create a large test collection of patents in the three main European languages for the evaluation of cross-lingual information access. The track focused on the task of prior art search, to which a second task was added in 2010, the patent classification task. The participating teams deployed a variety of Information Retrieval techniques, adapted or custom-made, to tackle with this specific domain and tasks. This chapter reports on activities undertaken to provide a set of topics for the two tasks, to extract the relevance assessments for the provided topics, and on evaluating the effectiveness of the employed retrieval methods.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is our direct experience that these explanations helped Ir researchers the most in understanding the relationships between the different kinds of patent documents constituting a patent.

  2. 2.

    For EP patents, documents at different stages have the same numeric identifier. For other patent offices this is not always the case. For example, the patent document US-6689545-B2 represents a US granted patent with its application document publication number US-2003011722-A1.

  3. 3.

    For a complete list of kind codes used by various patent offices see http://tinyurl.com/EPO-kindcodes.

  4. 4.

    See http://www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/en/.

  5. 5.

    Although the Marec collection was created after the first Clef–Ip campaign was set up in 2009, the documents in the Clef–Ip’09 corpus are included in the Marec collection, and use the same Dtd.

  6. 6.

    http://www.wipo.int/pct/en/.

  7. 7.

    http://www.alfresco.com/.

  8. 8.

    http://docasu.sourceforge.net/.

  9. 9.

    trec–eval version 8.0 http://trec.nist.gov/trec_eval.

References

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Acknowledgements

We thank Matrixware Information Systems GmbH for making available the patent corpus for this track, and for co-organizing the first evaluation campaign. We also thank Judy Hickey and Henk Tomas for sharing their know-how on prior art searches and patent life-cycles with us.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Retrieval Facility, Vienna, Austria

    Florina Piroi

  2. max.recall information systems, Vienna, Austria

    Veronika Zenz

Authors
  1. Florina Piroi
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  2. Veronika Zenz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Florina Piroi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information Retrieval Facility, Donau-City Straße 1, Vienna, 1220, Austria

    Mihai Lupu

  2. Information Retrieval Facility, Donau-City Straße 1, Vienna, 1220, Austria

    Katja Mayer

  3. Information Retrieval Facility, Donau-City Straße 1, Vienna, 1220, Austria

    John Tait

  4. 3LP Advisors, Post Rd. 7003, Dublin, 43016, Ohio, USA

    Anthony J. Trippe

Appendix

Appendix

Table 4.2 Indexing the data. Below, x indicates a field is used, – not used, x! indicates special treatment and ? indicates a lack of information on field usage
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Table 4.3 Query generation, retrieval systems, and ranking. Below, x indicates a field is used, - not used, x! indicates special treatment and ? indicates a lack of information on field usage
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Table 4.4 Systems, methods and document fields used in the Classification task
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Piroi, F., Zenz, V. (2011). Evaluating Information Retrieval in the Intellectual Property Domain: The Clef–Ip Campaign. In: Lupu, M., Mayer, K., Tait, J., Trippe, A. (eds) Current Challenges in Patent Information Retrieval. The Information Retrieval Series, vol 29. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19231-9_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19231-9_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-19230-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-19231-9

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