Making Text Resources Accessible to the Reader: the Case of Patent Claims

Hardly any other kind of text structures is as notoriously difficult to read as patents – which is first of all due to their abstract vocabulary and their very complex syntactic constructions. Especially the claims in a patent are a challenge: in accordance with international patent writing regulations, each claim must be rendered in a single sentence. As a result, sentences with more than 200 words are not uncommon. Therefore, paraphrasing of the claims in terms the user can understand is of high demand. We present a rule-based paraphrasing module that realizes paraphrasing of patent claims in English as a rewriting task. Prior to the rewriting proper, the module implies the stages of simplification and discourse and syntactic analyses. The rewriting makes use of a full-fledged text generator and consists in a number of genuine generation tasks such as aggregation, selection of referring expressions, choice of discourse markers and syntactic generation. As generator, we use the MATE-work bench, which is based on the Meaning-Text Theory of linguistics.