A study of query expansion methods for patent retrieval

Patent retrieval is a recall-oriented search task where the objective is to find all possible relevant documents. Queries in patent retrieval are typically very long since they take the form of a patent claim or even a full patent application in the case of priorart patent search. Nevertheless, there is generally a significant mismatch between the query and the relevant documents, often leading to low retrieval effectiveness. Some previous work has tried to address this mismatch through the application of query expansion (QE) techniques which have generally showed effectiveness for many other retrieval tasks. However, results of QE on patent search have been found to be very disappointing. We present a review of previous investigations of QE in patent retrieval, and explore some of these techniques on a prior-art patent search task. In addition, a novel method for QE using automatically generated synonyms set is presented. While previous QE techniques fail to improve over baseline retrieval, our new approach show statistically better retrieval precision over the baseline, although not for recall. In addition, it proves to be significantly more efficient than existing techniques. An extensive analysis to the results is presented which seeks to better understand situations where these QE techniques succeed or fail

Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks

This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web, today’s smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life. Key to the success of the NTCIR endeavor was early recognition that information access research is an empirical discipline and that evaluation therefore lay at the core of the enterprise. Evaluation is thus at the heart of each chapter in this book. They show, for example, how the recognition that some documents are more important than others has shaped thinking about evaluation design. The thirty-three contributors to this volume speak for the many hundreds of researchers from dozens of countries around the world who together shaped NTCIR as organizers and participants. This book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and students—anyone who wants to learn about past and present evaluation efforts in information retrieval, information access, and natural language processing, as well as those who want to participate in an evaluation task or even to design and organize one

Toward higher effectiveness for recall-oriented information retrieval: A patent retrieval case study

Research in information retrieval (IR) has largely been directed towards tasks requiring high precision. Recently, other IR applications which can be described as recall-oriented IR tasks have received increased attention in the IR research domain. Prominent among these IR applications are patent search and legal search, where users are typically ready to check hundreds or possibly thousands of documents in order to find any possible relevant document. The main concerns in this kind of application are very different from those in standard precision-oriented IR tasks, where users tend to be focused on finding an answer to their information need that can typically be addressed by one or two relevant documents. For precision-oriented tasks, mean average precision continues to be used as the primary evaluation metric for almost all IR applications. For recall-oriented IR applications the nature of the search task, including objectives, users, queries, and document collections, is different from that of standard precision-oriented search tasks. In this research study, two dimensions in IR are explored for the recall-oriented patent search task. The study includes IR system evaluation and multilingual IR for patent search. In each of these dimensions, current IR techniques are studied and novel techniques developed especially for this kind of recall-oriented IR application are proposed and investigated experimentally in the context of patent retrieval. The techniques developed in this thesis provide a significant contribution toward evaluating the effectiveness of recall-oriented IR in general and particularly patent search, and improving the efficiency of multilingual search for this kind of task

Game Scoring: Towards a Broader Theory

“Game scoring,” that is, the act of composing music for and through gaming, is distinct from other types of scoring. To begin with, unlike other scoring activities, game scoring depends on — in fact, it arguably is — software programming. The game scorer’s choices are thus first-and-foremost limited by available gaming technology, and the “programmability” of their musical ideas given that technology, at any given historical moment. Moreover, game scores are unique in that they must allow for an unprecedented level of musical flexibility, given the high degree of user interactivity the video game medium enables and encourages. As such, game scoring necessarily constitutes an at least partially aleatoric compositional activity, the final score being determined as much through gameplay as traditional composition. This thesis demonstrates this through case studies of the Nintendo Entertainment System sound hardware configuration, and game scores, including the canonic score for Super Mario Bros. (1985)

Unified entity search in social media community

ABSTRACT The search for entities is the most common search behavior on the Web, especially in social media communities where entities (such as images, videos, people, locations, and tags) are highly heterogeneous and correlated. While previous research usually deals with these social media entities separately, we are investigating in this paper a unified, multilevel, and correlative entity graph to represent the unstructured social media data, through which various applications (e.g., friend suggestion, personalized image search, image tagging, etc.) can be realized more effectively in one single framework. We regard the social media objects equally as "entities" and all of these applications as "entity search" problem which searches for entities with different types. We first construct a multi-level graph which organizes the heterogeneous entities into multiple levels, with one type of entities as vertices in each level. The edges between graphs pairwisely connect the entities weighted by intra-relations in the same level and inter-links across two different levels distilled from the social behaviors (e.g., tagging, commenting, and joining communities). To infer the strength of intrarelations, we propose a circular propagation scheme, which reinforces the mutual exchange of information across different entity types in a cyclic manner. Based on the constructed unified graph, we explicitly formulate entity search as a global optimization problem in a unified Bayesian framework, in which various applications are efficiently realized. Empirically, we validate the effectiveness of our unified entity graph for various social media applications on millionscale real-world dataset

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Efetividade das medidas anti-dumping : a circunvenção

Monografia (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Direito, 2013.É inelutável que a efetividade dos direitos anti-dumping tem sido motivo de grande polêmica no direito comercial internacional desde o final dos anos 80. A circunvenção não é fruto de ilações fantasiosas propostas pelas indústrias domésticas que se sentem prejudicadas ao notar que o direito anti-dumping aplicado não afetou o mercado como esperado. Hodiernamente, a circunvenção é prática corriqueira dos exportadores e produtores afetados pela aplicação de uma medida anti-dumping que, inclusive, já possuem o know-how das práticas elisivas, adquiridos nos anos pretéritos. Essa é a constatação irrefutável de diversos países. Superada a Rodada do Uruguai, quando houve maiores discussões sobre o tema na Organização Mundial do Comércio (OMC), não há consenso internacional sequer na definição das práticas de circunvenção, quanto mais nas medidas que possam neutraliza-la. As expectativas de que essa matéria seja acoimada pela OMC não se demonstram factíveis em curto prazo. Diante desses fatos, muitos países e blocos econômicos não encontraram outra saída senão, por si mesmos, criarem mecanismos que combatam a circunvenção dos direitos anti-dumping. O trabalho propôs a divisão destes mecanismos em quatro categorias: a utilização das regras de origem não preferenciais; a aplicação da Regra Geral 2(a) para Interpretação do Sistema Harmonizado; as investigações anticircunvenção; e a reformulação de algumas regras das investigações anti-dumping. A partir destes mecanismos, buscou-se tracejar as abordagens adotadas pelos principais atores do comércio internacional, nomeadamente os Estados Unidos e a União Europeia. E o Brasil, que recentemente adotou normas anticircunvenção no seu sistema normativo. Ademais, foram exploradas as abordagens da OMC sobre a circunvenção na Rodada do Uruguai e as suas implicações. Além disso, as contribuições que podem ser adicionadas à discussão em virtude da Harmonização das regras de origem propiciada pelo Acordo sobre Regras de Origem. Por derradeiro, diante dos temas expendidos, discutiu-se a problemática revelada pelos caminhos percorridos pelos atores do comércio internacional no sentido de basear o combate à circunvenção inteiramente nas investigações anticircunvenção. _____________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACTIt is unquestionable that the effectiveness of anti-dumping duties has been the subject of great controversy in international trade law since the late '80s. C circumvention practices are not the result of fanciful conclusions proposed by the domestic industries who feel harmed by noting that the anti-dumping duty applied did not affect the market as expected. In our times, the circumvention is common practice for exporters and producers affected by the application of anti-dumping duties who now, in addition, have the know-how, acquired in the past years. This is an irrefutable finding of several countries. Overcome the Uruguay Round, when there was more discussion on the topic at the World Trade Organization (WTO), there is no international consensus in the definition of circumvention practices or on the actions that can neutralize it. Expectations that this matter will be punished by WTO do not demonstrate feasible in the short term. Given these facts, many countries and economic blocs found no other way out but to, by themselves, establish mechanisms to combat circumvention of anti-dumping duties. This paper proposed the division of these mechanisms into four categories: the use of non-preferential rules of origin, the use of General Rule 2(a) for the Interpretation of the Harmonized System, the use of anticircumvention legislation and reworking of some rules of anti-dumping investigations. From these mechanisms, we sought to outline the approaches adopted by major players in the international trade, notably the United States and the European Union. And Brazil, which recently adopted anticircumvention legislation in its law system. Furthermore, we explored the approaches on circumvention made by WTO in the Uruguay Round and its implications. Therewithal, we discussed the contributions that can be added to the discussion because of the harmonization of rules of origin provided by the Agreement on Rules of Origin. For the last, considering the subjects expounded, we discussed the problems revealed by the paths taken by the actors of international trade towards combating circumvention based entirely on anticircumvention investigations

An Integrated Framework for Patent Analysis and Mining

Patent documents are important intellectual resources of protecting interests of individuals, organizations and companies. These patent documents have great research values, beneficial to the industry, business, law, and policy-making communities. Patent mining aims at assisting patent analysts in investigating, processing, and analyzing patent documents, which has attracted increasing interest in academia and industry. However, despite recent advances in patent mining, several critical issues in current patent mining systems have not been well explored in previous studies. These issues include: 1) the query retrieval problem that assists patent analysts finding all relevant patent documents for a given patent application; 2) the patent documents comparative summarization problem that facilitates patent analysts in quickly reviewing any given patent documents pairs; and 3) the key patent documents discovery problem that helps patent analysts to quickly grasp the linkage between different technologies in order to better understand the technical trend from a collection of patent documents. This dissertation follows the stream of research that covers the aforementioned issues of existing patent analysis and mining systems. In this work, we delve into three interleaved aspects of patent mining techniques, including (1) PatSearch, a framework of automatically generating the search query from a given patent application and retrieving relevant patents to user; (2) PatCom, a framework for investigating the relationship in terms of commonality and difference between patent documents pairs, and (3) PatDom, a framework for integrating multiple types of patent information to identify important patents from a large volume of patent documents. In summary, the increasing amount and textual complexity of patent repository lead to a series of challenges that are not well addressed in the current generation systems. My work proposed reasonable solutions to these challenges and provided insights on how to address these challenges using a simple yet effective integrated patent mining framework

Understanding Game Scoring: Software Programming, Aleatoric Composition and Mimetic Music Technology

Game scoring, that is, the act of composing music for and through gaming, is distinct from other types of scoring. To begin with, unlike other scoring activities, game scoring depends on — in fact, it arguably is — software programming. The game scorer‘s choices are thus first-and-foremost limited by available gaming technology, and the programmability of their musical ideas given that technology, at any given historical moment. Moreover, game scores are unique in that they must allow for an unprecedented level of musical flexibility, given the high degree of user interactivity the video game medium enables and encourages. As such, game scoring necessarily constitutes an at least partially aleatoric compositional activity, the final score being determined as much through gameplay as traditional composition. This dissertation demonstrates how game scoring is software programming that is structured by gaming technology, and that constitutes a unique kind of aleatoric composition, through case studies of the Nintendo Entertainment System sound hardware configuration, and game scores, including the canonic score for Super Mario Bros. (1985)