In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performances across various NLP tasks. However, their potential for automating the task of writing patent documents remains relatively unexplored. To address this gap, in this work, we propose a novel method, Patentformer, for generating patent specification by fine-tuning the generative models with diverse sources of information, e.g., patent claims, drawing text, and brief descriptions of the drawings. To enhance the generative models’ comprehension of the complex task of writing patent specification, we introduce a new task, claim+drawing-to-specification, and release a new dataset. We evaluate our proposed method on thousands of patents from the USPTO and show that our method can generate human-like patent specification in legal writing style. Human evaluations by four patent experts further affirm that our proposed method has the potential to generate correct specification, and the quality of generated specification may sometimes be better than the actual specification.

We propose a novel approach that jointly utilizes the labels and elicited rationales for text classification to speed up the training of deep learning models with limited training data. We define and optimize a ranking-constrained loss function that combines cross-entropy loss with ranking losses as rationale constraints. We evaluate our proposed rationale-augmented learning approach on three human-annotated datasets, and show that our approach provides significant improvements over classification approaches that do not utilize rationales as well as other state-of-the-art rationale-augmented baselines.