Multilingual Patent Text Retrieval Evaluation: CLEF–IP

Abstract

The CLEF–IP evaluation lab ran between 2009 and 2013 with a two-fold expressed purpose: (a) to encourage research in the area of patent retrieval with a focus on cross language retrieval, and (b) to provide a large and clean data set of patent related data, in the three main European languages, for experimentation. In its first year, CLEF–IP organized one task only, a text retrieval task that modelled the “Search for Prior Art” done by experts at patent offices. In the following years the types of CLEF–IP tasks broadened to include patent text classification, patent image retrieval and classification, and (formal) structure recognition. With each task, the test collection was extended to accommodate for the additional tasks. In this chapter we overview the evaluation tasks dealing with the textual content of the patents. The Intellectual Property (IP) domain is one where specific expertise is critical, implementing Information Retrieval (IR) approaches to support some of its tasks cannot be done without the use of this domain know-how. Even when such know-how is at hand, retrieval results, in general, do not come close to the expectations of patent experts.