Matthias Blume | Searcharxiv

arXiv2024

Comparing Complex Concepts with Transformers: Matching Patent Claims Against Natural Language Text

A key capability in managing patent applications or a patent portfolio is comparing claims to other text, e.g. a patent specification. Because the language of claims is different from language used elsewhere in the patent application or in non-patent text, this has been challenging for computer based natural language processing. We test two new LLM-based approaches and find that both provide substantially better performance than previously published values. The ability to match dense information from one domain against much more distributed information expressed in a different vocabulary may also be useful beyond the intellectual property space.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2011

A Consistent Semantics of Self-Adjusting Computation

This paper presents a semantics of self-adjusting computation and proves that the semantics are correct and consistent. The semantics integrate change propagation with the classic idea of memoization to enable reuse of computations under mutation to memory. During evaluation, reuse of a computation via memoization triggers a change propagation that adjusts the reused computation to reflect the mutated memory. Since the semantics integrate memoization and change-propagation, it involves both non-determinism (due to memoization) and mutation (due to change propagation). Our consistency theorem states that the non-determinism is not harmful: any two evaluations of the same program starting at the same state yield the same result. Our correctness theorem states that mutation is not harmful: self-adjusting programs are consistent with purely functional programming. We formalize the semantics and their meta-theory in the LF logical framework and machine check our proofs using Twelf.

cs.PL↗