Utilizing Sub-topic Units for Patent Prior-Art Search

One of the defining challenges in patent prior-art search is the problem of representing a long, technical document as a query. Previously work on this problem has concentrated on single query representations of the patent application. In the following paper, we describe an approach which uses multiple query representations generated from semantically coherent passages extracted from patent documents. We validate our technique in an experiment using the CLEF-IP 2011 patent search collection. Our system achieves statistically significant improvements over various state-of-art query generation techniques.