CLEF-IP 2011: Retrieval in the Intellectual Property Domain

The patent system is designed to encourage disclosure of new technologies and novel ideas by granting exclusive rights on the use of inventions to their inventors, for a limited period of time. Before a patent can be granted, patent o ces around the world perform thorough searches to ensure that no previous similar disclosures were made. In the intellectual property terminology, such kind of searches are called prior art searches. In some industries, the number of granted patents a company owns has a high impact on the market value of the company. This underlines the importance of well-performed prior art searches. Together with the Trec Chem track [5], also organized by our institution, the Clef Ip e ort comes to complete the work that is being done in the series of Ntcir workshops (see for example [4]). The rst Clef Ip track ran within Clef 2009. The purpose of the track was twofold: to encourage and facilitate research in the area of patent retrieval by providing a large clean data set for experimentation; to create a large test collection of patents in the three main European languages for the evaluation of cross lingual information access. The Clef Ip data set includes documents published by the European Patent O ce (Epo) which contain a mixture of English, German and French content. The track focused on the task of prior art search. In 2010 and 2011, the Clef Ip track was organized as a benchmarking activity (lab) in the Clef conference. In these years, the main goal of the Clef Ip e ort remained the same to foster research in the patent retrieval area, and provide a large clean data set. To this end, the number of tasks in the track was increased and the data set was enlarged. Recognizing the importance of patent classi cations in the daily activity of an intellectual property professional, in 2010 the Clef Ip benchmarking activity included a patent classi cation task. The participants were asked to classify