arXiv · 2310.15689
Creating a silver standard for patent simplification
Abstract
Patents are legal documents that aim at protecting inventions on the one hand and at making technical knowledge circulate on the other. Their complex style -- a mix of legal, technical, and extremely vague language -- makes their content hard to access for humans and machines and poses substantial challenges to the information retrieval community. This paper proposes an approach to automatically simplify patent text through rephrasing. Since no in-domain parallel simplification data exist, we propose a method to automatically generate a large-scale silver standard for patent sentences. To obtain candidates, we use a general-domain paraphrasing system; however, the process is error-prone and difficult to control. Thus, we pair it with proper filters and construct a cleaner corpus that can successfully be used to train a simplification system. Human evaluation of the synthetic silver corpus shows that it is considered grammatical, adequate, and contains simple sentences.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Silvia Casola, Alberto Lavelli, Horacio Saggion. 2023-10-24. Creating a silver standard for patent simplification. https://doi.org/10.1145/3539618.3591657
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.