WORKSHOP on PATENT RETRIEVALSIGIR 2000 Workshop Report
Noriko Kando

Mun-Kew Leong

National Institute of Informatics (NII)

BIGonthenet.com

Tokyo, Japan
Noriko.Kando@nii.ac.jp

Singapore
munkew.leong@BIGonthenet.com

URL: http://www.rd.nacsis.ac.jp/~ntcadm/sigir2000ws/
1 Introduction
The goal of the workshop is to foster research anddevelopment of the technology for patent search andretrieval by providing a forum in which researchers andpractitioners from relevant communities can share theirideas, approaches, perspectives, and experiences fromtheir work in progress.
Retrieving patent and other Intellectual Property (IP)documents is quite critical in various areas including
science and technology, marketing, intellectual property
right management, business and so on. In the past, muchof the focus for patent and IP retrieval has been from thedatabase community, and not from the Information
Retrieval (IR) community. It is partly because the researchand development in IR has tended to place emphasis on
the generalized systems, which are effective for any kindsof documents and any kinds of queries. It is partly because
the text genre of the patents has highly specificcharacteristics both in semantics and syntax of the text
and has highly specialized ways of use by professional
users. We assumed that this is the right time to organize aworkshop since supporting technology for specialized
retrieval is ready.
In addition to the retrieval of documents, other areas ofresearch and development include the extraction, usage
and strategic analysis of the text documents, automatic
summarization, classification, and comparisons acrossrelated documents. A particular area of international
interest is the access of patent and IP documents in aforeign language (i.e., what is termed cross-language ortranslingual document retrieval).
The workshop planed to bring together peopleinterested in patent retrieval and in better access to patentdocuments from different communities including patentoffices, patent vendors, and information retrieval
researchers in both system-oriented and user-oriented
approaches. The aim was to share ideas, approaches,perspectives, and experiences from their work in progressto ensure a thorough exploration of their common ground.
Therefore we placed the emphasis on the following
aspects;- to achieve a better understanding of existing
systems, of the user perspective, and of the usage ofthe patents genre as well as its terminology, ontology,
and text structure, and- to discuss future directions for research anddevelopment in patent retrieval and appropriate
schemes for evaluation, based on the commonground.
Submitted research papers and invited papers covered
wide variety of topics regarding patent retrieval andclearly showed the characteristic aspects of the patent
retrieval.
In the following Section 2 shows the format of theworkshop. Section 3 is a brief review of the papers
presented at the workshop and a discussion, while Section
4 concludes.
2 Format of the Workshop
The workshop started with opening remarks and there
were six sessions after it. The first five were about (1)exiting systems for patent searching, (2) research issues inpatent retrieval systems including cross language
information retrieval, ontology and interaction, and (3)evaluation of patent search systems.
The final session was a discussion with the speakers
and audience to discuss issues raised during the workshop
and the way ahead of the research and development of thepatent retrieval systems, and a demonstration.
3 Workshop Presentations and Discussion
Opening
MunKew Leong, one of the co-chairs of the workshop
briefly presented the aim for this workshop and the reason

why we organized it at this SIGIR. Our aims are; to bring
together the communities involved, to provide a forum, tofoster closer ties between the communities and ultimately
to be the first of a series of patent retrieval workshops.
SESSION 1: Existing System for Patent Searching
Munehisa Saito from Japan Patent Information
Organization (JAPIO) introduced the commercial patent
search system of Japanese patents, utility models, designs,
and trademarks PATOLIS. He also discussed on themethods used in its English counterpart PATOLIS-e,
which is an information service using the PATOLIS
database in English using Japanese-English concordancetable and future plan. The presentation gave an overview
of the characteristics of the patent search and its
difficulties, then also introduced the lexical resources
constructed by JAPIO to enhance the access to theJapanese patents.
SESSION 2: Research Issues in Patent Retrieval
Systems 1 - Cross Language Information Retrieval(CLIR)
Leo Sarasua and Guido Corremans of European Patent
Office presented on "Cross Lingual Issues in Patent
Retrieval" and the prototype system bSmart, which
combines phrasal indexing and a Case Based Grammar
and has capability of the cross language retrieval among
English, German, Spanish, and Japanese. First theysummarized the characteristics of patent retrieval and thegenre of the patent as (1) the detail of the search, (2)interactive search by experts requires a deep analysis ofthe expression, (3) structure of a patent document ishomogeneous, (4) the heavy use of the generic terms andvague expressions, (5) extensive use of acronyms and newwords, (6) sentences are grammatically correct but use
limited syntactic structure, which allowing theconstruction of efficient parsers with very high accuracy.
Then the weighting scheme and the results of theexperiments of the English-Japanese CLIR was shown.
The striking point of the weighting scheme is, the tf is not
used since important concepts are often hidden in the text
with general or vague expression in the patent documents.
Masatoshi Fukui, Atsushi Fujii et al, presented on"Applying Hybrid Query Translation Method toJapanese/English Cross-Language Patent Retrieval". Itwas on the design and results of the experiments onlaboratory-based CLIR system with query-translation
approach of the patent documents using the algorithm andtransliteration, which was originally developed for theJapanese-English CLIR of scientific and technicaldocuments.

SESSION 3: Research Issues in Patent Retrieval
Systems 2 - Ontology and Interaction
Ray R. Larson and his colleague presented on "The Entry
Vocabulary Module Approach to Patent Search andClassification" and reported the work at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, on the design and development ofEnglish language indexes to metadata vocabularies andspecifically to the US and International patentclassification system. The emerging network environment
brings access to an increasing population of heterogeneous
repositories with diverse metadata vocabularies. Thissystem is to support searchers who encounter anunfamiliar metadata vocabulary to know which codes orterms will lead to what is wanted.
A.W. McLean presented on "Patent Space
Visualisation for Patent Retrieval", which describing anovel and flexible architecture and user interface forpatent queries and visualization of query results. Initial
sets of requirements were gathered from patent engineers
at the company and the author explored the techniques
allow a user to build up a stack of queries which allow realtime updates of any part of the query and display theresults over a 2D map to allow the user to gain a better
understanding of the patent space. A query-part can be anormal retrieval query, domain specific (e.g. using
International Patent Classification), input, processing, orvisualization.
SESSION 4. Research Issues in Patent Retrieval
systems 3 - Ontology and Interaction (2)MunKew Leong presented on "Specialised Querying inPatent Retrieval", which describing a pilot project patent
retrieval system between Intellectual Property Office ofSingapore. The system is for a specific domain of protein
sequence with medium text representation of protein
sequences by sequence structure matching of BLAST2.0and WU-BLAST2.0 homology search algorithms. Inaddition, other examples of specialized patent searchsystems, retrieval of chemical patents including chemical
structure and/or formula matching and discover chemical
reactions, and the process searching were shown. Then theauthor summarized the characteristics of the patent searchin the specialized domain in the aspects of data, searchsystems, user and workflow and proposed the specialized
possibilities.
Naomi Inoue et al presented on "Patent Retrieval
System Using Document Filtering Techniques", which
describing an experimental patent retrieval system whichanybody can make use of easily. It uses document filtering
techniques based on probabilistic model searching
documents relevant to the user's interest. The system has
been used in the authors' laboratories since the beginningof this year and the paper reported the filtering method

used and experimental results.
SESSION 5: Evaluation of Patent Search Systems
Noriko Kando reported on the preliminary results of thebrainstorming on "what we shall evaluate on patent
retrieval systems" with ten real patent users including
specialized intermediaries of patent searching and patent
attorneys in the course of planning construction of a patent
test collection and an evaluation of patent retrieval
systems using it in the future NTCIR Workshop. To set up
realistic search requests appropriate for the document
types and the real tasks of users is critical to validate thelaboratory-typed testing using the test collection.
Especially retrieving patents has highly specificcharacteristics in both the nature of the documents
themselves and the way of usage. To understand the reallife tasks with patent retrieval is extremely important. The
results were summarized in the following points; (1)stages in the patent application process, (2) industries, (3)terminology, (4) high recall, (5) classification scheme, (6)support tools, (7) high precision, (8) document structure(9) images, and (10) task-oriented evaluation.
Preben Hansen and Kalervo Jaervelin presented on"The Information Seeking and Retrieval process at theSwedish Patent Office: Moving from Lab-based to real life
work-task environment", which describing a set ofmethods that is currently used in a study of the task
performance process of patent engineers within theSwedish Patent and registration Office and thepreliminary results. The focus of the study was toinvestigate the relationship between the user's work-task
and the information seeking and retrieval process. Theauthors argued that we need to take a broader perspectiveon the information seeking to understand the task
performance process and elicit requirements for
information system design.
SESSION 6: Discussion among All the Participants
The final session was chaired by MunKew Leong and wasa discussion about the issues emerged among thediscussions followed by each presentation. The following
issues were raised and discussed with the participants;(1) Classification schemes,(2) Tasks -- "information seeking behavior?",(3) Linguistic and other resources. for example, source
data, thesauri, domain word lists, etc. and theimportance to encouraging the sharing them,(4) Language is evolving, unusually fast in the patentcontext. For example, as Leo clearly pointed out,
every patent uses new words. Training based
systems must have lag time. and(5) Interfaces for patent retrieval systems, especially for
CLIR.
4 Conclusions
The brief summary of the Workshop on Patent Retrieval
was reported. The workshop gathered a wide variety of
topics regarding patent retrieval and helped us tounderstand the characteristics of the patent genre, issues
in patent retrieval, user interface and analyzing patents
and its users. Also this workshop reported on the current
state of the art, expectations from each of the communities
and what to expect in the future and provided a good
opportunity to learn each other.
For the further information about the workshop, the online
proceedings will be available at ;http://www.rd.nacsis.ac.jp/~ntcadm/sigir2000ws/
It includes the papers presented, slides, and links to thedemonstration systems.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our thanks to the program committee, Mariko Iwasawa,
Francois Paradis, and Paraic Sheridan, to the speakers, tothe Organizers of the SIGIR 2000 for their help and to all
the attendees for their active participation.