Saying the Patent Phrase Similarity Dataset

Patent paperwork sometimes use authorized and extremely technical language, with context-dependent phrases that will have meanings fairly totally different from colloquial utilization and even between totally different paperwork. The method of utilizing conventional patent search strategies (e.g., key phrase looking) to look via the corpus of over 100 million patent paperwork may be tedious and end in many missed outcomes as a result of broad and non-standard language used. For instance, a “soccer ball” could also be described as a “spherical recreation gadget”, “inflatable sportsball” or “ball for ball sport”. Moreover, the language utilized in some patent paperwork might obfuscate phrases to their benefit, so extra highly effective pure language processing (NLP) and semantic similarity understanding can provide everybody entry to do an intensive search.

The patent area (and extra common technical literature like scientific publications) poses distinctive challenges for NLP modeling resulting from its use of authorized and technical phrases. Whereas there are a number of generally used general-purpose semantic textual similarity (STS) benchmark datasets (e.g., STS-B, SICK, MRPC, PIT), to the most effective of our information, there are presently no datasets centered on technical ideas present in patents and scientific publications (the considerably associated BioASQ problem incorporates a biomedical query answering activity). Furthermore, with the persevering with progress in dimension of the patent corpus (hundreds of thousands of latest patents are issued worldwide yearly), there’s a have to develop extra helpful NLP fashions for this area.

At this time, we announce the discharge of the Patent Phrase Similarity dataset, a brand new human-rated contextual phrase-to-phrase semantic matching dataset, and the accompanying paper, offered on the SIGIR PatentSemTech Workshop, which focuses on technical phrases from patents. The Patent Phrase Similarity dataset incorporates ~50,000 rated phrase pairs, every with a Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) class as context. Along with similarity scores which are sometimes included in different benchmark datasets, we embrace granular score courses much like WordNet, corresponding to synonym, antonym, hypernym, hyponym, holonym, meronym, and area associated. This dataset (distributed below the Artistic Commons Attribution 4.0 Worldwide license) was utilized by Kaggle and USPTO because the benchmark dataset within the U.S. Patent Phrase to Phrase Matching competitors to attract extra consideration to the efficiency of machine studying fashions on technical textual content. Preliminary outcomes present that fashions fine-tuned on this new dataset carry out considerably higher than common pre-trained fashions with out fine-tuning.

The Patent Phrase Similarity Dataset

To higher practice the following era of state-of-the-art fashions, we created the Patent Phrase Similarity dataset, which incorporates many examples to handle the next issues: (1) phrase disambiguation, (2) adversarial key phrase matching, and (3) laborious adverse key phrases (i.e., key phrases which are unrelated however acquired a excessive rating for similarity from different fashions ). Some key phrases and phrases can have a number of meanings (e.g., the phrase “mouse” might seek advice from an animal or a pc enter gadget), so we disambiguate the phrases by together with CPC courses with every pair of phrases. Additionally, many NLP fashions (e.g., bag of phrases fashions) is not going to do effectively on knowledge with phrases which have matching key phrases however are in any other case unrelated (adversarial key phrases, e.g., “container part” → “kitchen container”, “offset desk” → “desk fan”). The Patent Phrase Similarity dataset is designed to incorporate many examples of matching key phrases which are unrelated via adversarial key phrase match, enabling NLP fashions to enhance their efficiency.

Every entry within the Patent Phrase Similarity dataset incorporates two phrases, an anchor and goal, a context CPC class, a score class, and a similarity rating. The dataset incorporates 48,548 entries with 973 distinctive anchors, cut up into coaching (75%), validation (5%), and take a look at (20%) units. When splitting the information, all the entries with the identical anchor are stored collectively in the identical set. There are 106 totally different context CPC courses and all of them are represented within the coaching set.

Producing the Dataset

To generate the Patent Phrase Similarity knowledge, we first course of the ~140 million patent paperwork within the Google Patent’s corpus and routinely extract necessary English phrases, that are sometimes noun phrases (e.g., “fastener”, “lifting meeting”) and useful phrases (e.g., “meals processing”, “ink printing”). Subsequent, we filter and maintain phrases that seem in at the very least 100 patents and randomly pattern round 1,000 of those filtered phrases, which we name anchor phrases. For every anchor phrase, we discover all the matching patents and all the CPC courses for these patents. We then randomly pattern as much as 4 matching CPC courses, which turn out to be the context CPC courses for the precise anchor phrase.

We use two totally different strategies for pre-generating goal phrases: (1) partial matching and (2) a masked language mannequin (MLM). For partial matching, we randomly choose phrases from your entire corpus that partially match with the anchor phrase (e.g., “abatement” → “noise abatement”, “materials formation” → “formation materials”). For MLM, we choose sentences from the patents that comprise a given anchor phrase, masks them out, and use the Patent-BERT mannequin to foretell candidates for the masked portion of the textual content. Then, all the phrases are cleaned up, which incorporates lowercasing and the removing of punctuation and sure stopwords (e.g., “and”, “or”, “stated”), and despatched to skilled raters for overview. Every phrase pair is rated independently by two raters expert within the expertise space. Every rater additionally generates new goal phrases with totally different rankings. Particularly, they’re requested to generate some low-similarity and unrelated targets that partially match with the unique anchor and/or some high-similarity targets. Lastly, the raters meet to debate their rankings and provide you with last rankings.

Dataset Analysis

To judge its efficiency, the Patent Phrase Similarity dataset was used within the U.S. Patent Phrase to Phrase Matching Kaggle competitors. The competitors was very talked-about, drawing about 2,000 opponents from world wide. Quite a lot of approaches had been efficiently utilized by the highest scoring groups, together with ensemble fashions of BERT variants and prompting (see the complete dialogue for extra particulars). The desk under exhibits the most effective outcomes from the competitors, in addition to a number of off-the-shelf baselines from our paper. The Pearson correlation metric was used to measure the linear correlation between the expected and true scores, which is a useful metric to focus on for downstream fashions to allow them to distinguish between totally different similarity rankings.

The baselines within the paper may be thought of zero-shot within the sense that they use off-the-shelf fashions with none additional fine-tuning on the brand new dataset (we use these fashions to embed the anchor and goal phrases individually and compute the cosine similarity between them). The Kaggle competitors outcomes exhibit that through the use of our coaching knowledge, one can obtain important enhancements in contrast with current NLP fashions. We have now additionally estimated human efficiency on this activity by evaluating a single rater’s scores to the mixed rating of each raters. The outcomes point out that this isn’t a very simple activity, even for human consultants.

Conclusion and Future Work

We current the Patent Phrase Similarity dataset, which was used because the benchmark dataset within the U.S. Patent Phrase to Phrase Matching competitors, and exhibit that through the use of our coaching knowledge, one can obtain important enhancements in contrast with current NLP fashions.

Extra difficult machine studying benchmarks may be generated from the patent corpus, and patent knowledge has made its means into a lot of immediately’s most-studied fashions. For instance, the C4 textual content dataset used to coach T5 incorporates many patent paperwork. The BigBird and LongT5 fashions additionally use patents through the BIGPATENT dataset. The supply, breadth and open utilization phrases of full textual content knowledge (see Google Patents Public Datasets) makes patents a novel useful resource for the analysis neighborhood. Prospects for future duties embrace massively multi-label classification, summarization, info retrieval, image-text similarity, quotation graph prediction, and translation. See the paper for extra particulars.

Acknowledgements

This work was doable via a collaboration with Kaggle, Satsyil Corp., USPTO, and MaxVal. Due to contributors Ian Wetherbee from Google, Will Cukierski and Maggie Demkin from Kaggle. Due to Jerry Ma, Scott Beliveau, and Jamie Holcombe from USPTO and Suja Chittamahalingam from MaxVal for his or her contributions.