Unsupervised Training Set Generation for Automatic Acquisition of Technical Terminology in Patents

NLP methods for automatic information access to rich technological knowledge sources like patents are of great value. One important resource for accessing this knowledge is the technical terminology of the patent domain. In this paper, we address the problem of automatic terminology acquisition (ATA), i.e., the problem of automatically identifying all technical terms in a document. We analyze technical terminology in patents and define the concept of technical term based on the analysis. We present a novel method for labeling large amounts of high-quality training data for ATA in an unsupervised fashion. We train two ATA methods on this training data, a term candidate classifier and a conditional random field (CRF), and investigate the utility of different types of features. Finally, we show that our method of automatically generating training data is effective and the two ATA methods successfully generalize, considerably increasing recall while preserving high precision relative to a state-of-the-art baseline.