Hunt for Buried Treasures: Extracting Unclaimed Embodiments from Patent Specifications
Chikara Hashimoto, Gautam Kumar, Shuichiro Hashimoto, Jun Suzuki
Abstract
Patent applicants write patent specificationsthat describe embodiments of inventions. Some embodiments are claimed for a patent,while others may be unclaimeddue to strategic considerations. Unclaimed embodiments may be extracted byapplicants later and claimed incontinuing applications togain advantages over competitors. Despite being essential for corporate intellectual property (IP) strategies,unclaimed embodiment extraction is conducted manually,and little research has been conducted on its automation. This paper presents a novel task ofunclaimed embodiment extraction (UEE)and a novel dataset for the task. Our experiments with Transformer-based modelsdemonstratedthat the task was challenging as it requiredconducting natural language inference onpatent specifications, which consisted oftechnical, long, syntactically and semanticallyinvolved sentences. We release the dataset and code to foster this new area of research.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{hashimoto-etal-2023-hunt,
title = "Hunt for Buried Treasures: Extracting Unclaimed Embodiments from Patent Specifications",
author = "Hashimoto, Chikara and
Kumar, Gautam and
Hashimoto, Shuichiro and
Suzuki, Jun",
editor = "Sitaram, Sunayana and
Beigman Klebanov, Beata and
Williams, Jason D",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)",
month = jul,
year = "2023",
address = "Toronto, Canada",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-industry.3/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-industry.3",
pages = "25--36"
}