Abstract
Patent specifications consist of patent claims and detailed descriptions.While patent claims are the most important part of patent specifications, they are compositionally or combinationally described and difficult to read.By aligning patent claims with the “detailed description”, (1) the functions and the effects of the claim can be clarified, (2) the important elements in the claims can be identified, or (3) paraphrases for the expressions in the claim can be obtained.In this paper, we propose a method to align patent claims with the “detailed description” by analyzing the structure of claims to get core elements of claims and by doing local alignments starting from word blocks including declinable words.By using 88 patent specifications out of 100 which were randomly picked up from the NTCIR3 patent data collection, the effectiveness of the method is demonstrated.
