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.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-industry.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Sunayana Sitaram, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Jason D Williams
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
25–36
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-industry.3
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-industry.3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chikara Hashimoto, Gautam Kumar, Shuichiro Hashimoto, and Jun Suzuki. 2023. Hunt for Buried Treasures: Extracting Unclaimed Embodiments from Patent Specifications. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track), pages 25–36, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hunt for Buried Treasures: Extracting Unclaimed Embodiments from Patent Specifications (Hashimoto et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-industry.3.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-industry.3.mp4