Improving the Comprehension of Legal Documentation:
The Case of Patent Claims
Nadjet Bouayad-Agha
Gerard Casamayor
Gabriela Ferraro
Simon Mille
Vanesa Vidal
Universitat Pompeu Fabra and
Barcelona Media
Barcelona, Spain
firstname.lastname@upf.edu
ABSTRACT
With their abstract vocabulary and overly long sentences,
patent claims, like several other genres of legal discourse,
are notoriously difficult to read and comprehend. The enor-
mous number of both native and non-native users reading
patent claims on a daily basis raises the demand for means
that make them easier and faster to understand. An obvious
way to satisfy this demand is to paraphrase the original ma-
terial, i.e., to rewrite it in a more appropriate style, or—even
better—to summarize it in the language of preference of the
reader such that the reader can rapidly grasp its essence.
PATExpert is a patent processing service which incorpo-
rates, among other technologies, paraphrasing and multilin-
gual summarization of patent claims. With the goal to offer
the user the most suitable options and to evaluate alter-
native techniques that are based on different contextual and
linguistic criteria, both paraphrasing and summarization im-
plement “surface-oriented” strategies and “deep” strategies.
The surface strategies make use of shallow linguistic criteria
such as punctuation and syntactic and lexical markers. The
deep strategies operate on deep-syntactic structures of the
claims, using a full fledged text generator for synthesis of
the paraphrase or summary, respectively.
1. INTRODUCTION
With their abstract vocabulary and overly long sentences,
patent claims, like several other genres of legal discourse,
are notoriously difficult to read and comprehend. Yet given
that they define the legal scope of the invention they de-
scribe, their comprehension is crucial to specialists and non-
specialists alike. The enormous number of both native and
non-native users reading patent claims on a daily basis fur-
ther raises the demand for means that make patent claims
easier and faster to understand. An obvious way to satisfy
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Copyright 2009 ACM 1-60558-597-0/09/0006 ...$5.00.
Leo Wanner
Instituci catalana de recerca i estudis avanats
(ICREA) and
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona, Spain
leo.wanner@icrea.es
this demand is to paraphrase the original material, i.e., to
rewrite it in a more appropriate style, or—even better—to
summarize it in the language of preference of the reader such
that the reader can rapidly grasp its essence and decide then
whether he wants to go on reading the paraphrased version
or the original.
Paraphrasing and summarization are popular research top-
ics in computational linguistics; a number of techniques have
thus been already developed. However, the peculiar style
and abstract vocabulary of patent claims make the appli-
cation of standard techniques that target general discourse
difficult. In particular in the area of text summarization, it
is well-known that specialized discourse requires discourse-
and genre-specific strategies [1, 2, 14]. This is especially true
for patent summarization.
We present the techniques for paraphrasing and multi-
lingual summarization of patent claims developed in the
PATExpert project [15].1 In order to account for differ-
ent needs a user might have and to evaluate alternative
techniques that are based on different contextual and lin-
guistic criteria, both paraphrasing and summarization im-
plement “surface-oriented” strategies and “deep” strategies.
The surface strategies make use of shallow linguistic criteria
such as punctuation and syntactic and lexical markers. The
deep strategies operate on deep-syntactic or shallow seman-
tic structures of the claims and presuppose thus a full fledged
text generator for synthesis of the paraphrase or summary,
respectively. All strategies share several common prepro-
cessing stages which are first of all due to the peculiar lin-
guistic style of the claims. Therefore, we implement them
in one single module—although paraphrasing and summa-
rization have been traditionally considered clearly divided
tasks.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we present
an overview of the system architecture. The overview is fol-
lowed by a detailed description of each of the submodules
together with the presentation of the paraphrasing and sum-
marization techniques used in the corresponding submodule
(Sections 3 to 5). In Section 6, we discuss the works that
are related to our. Finally, Section 7 concludes with some
remarks and plans for future work. An Annex, which has
been added for convenience of the reader, contains an orig-
1
PATExpert has been partially funded by the European
Commission under the contract number FP6-028116.
inal patent claim and the corresponding PATExpert sum-
maries in English and French.

2. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The different paraphrasing and summarization strategies
realized in PATExpert are interconnected in that the result
of one strategy serves as starting point for another strategy.
We can thus speak of a single pipeline of sub-modules. Such
architecture has two advantages: (i) a single pipeline is eas-
ier to maintain than several isolated sub-modules that act
independently of each other, (ii) the user can be offered the
output of the intermediate modules as a valid paraphrase or
summary, respectively. Figure 1 illustrates in detail the ar-
chitecture of the paraphrasing and summarization module.
The architecture is divided into three main submodules:

1. Patent claims dependency structuring, which is re-

sponsible for the identification and representation of
the relation between independent and dependent claims.

2. Claim sentence simplification, which segments each ori-

ginal claim sentence and “repairs” the segments so as
to obtain grammatical sentences. Furthermore, this
submodule determines the discourse structure over the
obtained segments and the co-referential links between
noun phrases. Thus no information is lost during the
simplification process and the full meaning can be re-
produced in the next stage.

3. Generation and deep-syntactic (or shallow semantic)

Figure 1: Architecture of the paraphrasing and sum-
pruning, which, given a deep syntactic structure of
marization module (Greyed-out processes are optional)
each shorter sentence, first either removes parts of the
structure according to specific summarization criteria
or leaves it as it is and then generates from the pruned
dependency tree according to a user defined percentage, with
respectively original structure a text in English or in
100% meaning all dependent claims are kept, and 0% mean-
any of the languages available. So far, we cover, apart
ing no dependent claims are kept.
from English, German, French and Spanish.

3. CLAIMS DEPENDENCY STRUCTURING
The text structure of a patent claim section is a tree that
is predefined by the dependency between the claims, made
explicit by textual references such as according to Claim 1,
as set forth in claims 1 to 3, as in claims 3-5, as defined by
claims 1 and 2, etc. Structures of different complexity can
be encountered. Errors are not seldom and must be dealt
with. Thus, one of the errors that is especially disturbing
for discourse processing is a claim referring back to itself
directly or indirectly, or referring back to a claim that does
not exist.
Level 1 of the resulting text structure tree corresponds to
independent claims (claims that do not refer back to super-
ordinated claims) whilst the other levels correspond to de-
pendent claims. Consider, for illustration, a sample claim
structure of a German patent in Figure 2. The numbers
stand for the individual claims; the arcs connect dependent
claims with the claims on which they depend. Dependent
claims cannot stand on their own and must be read in the
context of the claims they depend on in order to be fully un-
derstood [10]. Furthermore, we can assume that the deeper a
claim is in the claim structure the more detailed is the infor-
mation it renders. This is exploited in the claim dependency
structure based summarization approach which prunes the
4. SIMPLIFICATION
As shown in Figure 1, the simplification proper of each
original claim-sentence is performed in five separate stages:
(i) part-of-speech (POS) tagging and chunking using Tree-
Tagger [11] with its off-the-shelf English parameter set;
(ii) segmentation of a claim sentence into clausal discourse
units;
(iii) establishment of coreference links between NPs that
denote the same object;
(iv) building a clause-discourse tree drawing upon corefer-
ence links and other information such as tree configu-
ration and discourse markers;
(v) reconstruction of the individual segments in order to
obtain grammatically correct independent sentences
out of each of them.
Let us discuss these five stages (and, in particular, the
fourth of them since clause-discourse structuring is primary
for both the simplification and the subsequent discourse
summarization).

Figure 2: Illustration of the claim dependency struc-
ture of a German claim
4.1 Stages of the simplification
POS tagging is a standard procedure in corpus-oriented
computational linguistics and does not require any further
mention here. Sentence segmentation is carried out using the
best from a set of simple rule-based and machine-learning
based segmentation algorithms that use lexical, punctua-
tion, POS and chunk information. For coreference determi-
nation, a simple coreference resolution algorithm has been
implemented that relies on the patent claims characteris-
tic nominal phrase (NP) repetition to realize coreference.2
Roughly, we consider that two NPs corefer if they have iden-
tical N′ (i.e., the two NPs without determiners are identi-
cal). Given that each claim is realized in a single sentence,
the discourse tree construction relies on the identification
of the sentence’s clause structure, that is, the identification
of the sentence’s coordination, subordination and juxtapo-
sition relations. Clause-discourse structuring consists of the
following main substages:
1. Clause Structuring: The output of this substage is
a binary tree whose terminal nodes are the segments
(aka clauses) obtained in the previous stage and whose
intermediate nodes specify whether the subtree is a
subordination, coordination or juxtaposition.
2. Clause tree flattening: The obtained binary clause
tree is flattened to account for n-ary constructs such
as coordinations.
3. Projection of the clause structure onto the dis-
couse structure: Each intermediate node of the tree
is enriched with discourse information based on Rhetor-
ical Structure Theory (RST) [5], labelling the discourse
units (=spans) as nucleus/satellite and determining
the relation between them according to a set of rules
that use the type of constructs and lexical information.
2 3
NP repetition (instead of, for instance, pronominalization)
is one of the means used in patents to avoid ambiguity).
Clause structuring searches for the best clause structure
in a space restricted by a set of weighted rules, each of which
is further restricted by a set of constraints. The rules en-
code the fundamental features for the identification of coor-
dination, subordination and juxtaposition relations between
spans, whilst the constraints ensure syntactic correctness
and global coherence of the tree under construction. This
rule-based approach proved reasonable given the regulations
of the linguistic style in the patent domain.
A rule R is a quadruple <F1 ,F2 ,W0 ,Wc >, where :
• F1 and F2 are the feature tuples describing the two
spans S1 and S2 to join.
• W0 is the rule’s initial weight.
• Wc is a set of weighted constraints.
The features tuples are quintuples Fi of the kind <punct,
coord,subord,syntagm,colon>, where punct is the clause de-
limiter punctuation preceding the segment, coord is a co-
ordination marker, subord is a subordination marker, syn-
tagm is the span’s syntactic group (mainly Sentence, Noun
Phrase or Verb Phrase), and colon is whether the clause
contains a colon.3 For instance, one of the rules address
the plain coordinaation between spans whose features are
<*,0,+,+,*> and <’,’,+,+,+,*>. We currently have ten
rules that specialize in the description of one of the following
constructs: plain coordination, semi-colon coordination, co-
ordination of subordinations, juxtaposition, subordination.
The initial weight of the rules is currently set to 1, apart
from a fall-back rule which is set to 0.001 as it must only
apply if all else fails (see inmediatly below).
The currently implemented constraints are presented in
Table 1. The rules, constraints and associated weights for
rule application were adjusted in a series of iterative trials
based on the evaluation of a small development corpus of
manually structured claims. The development corpus con-
sists of eight claims (104 segments) from the Optical Record-
ing Devices domain selected because of their reasonable au-
tomatic segmentation and size (average of 10 segments per
claim), with the aim that they provide a good coverage
for the first round experiments (see the evaluation). The
weights reflect whether a constraint is a strong or soft prefer-
ence or a hard syntactic constraint. For example, constraint
7 makes coordination a barrier to subordination, disallowing
the situation in which S2 is subordinated to S1 if S1 is a co-
ordinated clause. Constraint 8 rewards thematic continuity,
giving the highest weight to the case in which the first NP
of S2 corefers with some NP of S1 and the lowest weight to
the one in which no NP of S2 corefers in S1 .
For a given set of segments, the number of possible syntac-
tic analyses which a set of rules can yield grows exponentially
with the number of segments a sentence can be divided into,
thus rendering the problem of exploring all possible trees in-
tractable when the number of segments is high enough. Due
to the complexity of claim sentences, large segment sets are
common. For this reason, a variation of a local beam search
algorithm was used to search amongst the various possible
syntactic trees, with the metrics calculated for each applica-
tion of a rule serving as the objective function guiding the
algorithm. The goal of this algorithm is a rooted tree. In
In our approach, a segment is a sentence if it starts with a
noun phrase followed by a verb phrase.
 Constraints Weights
Plain coordination, Coordination of subordinations:
C1) Spans have the same syntagm. Yes=1, No=0.5
C2) If spans are not separated by a comma, then their core clauses Yes=1, No=0.5
are contiguous (and the reverse is true). (or reverse)
C3) Non-terminal S2 are constructed with a coordination. Yes=1, No=0
Coordination of subordinations:
C4) Spans must be introduced by the same subordinated marker. Yes=1, No=0.1
Semi-colon coordination:
C5) Non-terminal S2 is constructed with a semi-colon coordination. Yes=1, No=0
Subordination:
C6) Favour right branching. Yes=1, No=0.1
C7) Non-terminal S1 is coordination. Yes=0, No=1
Subordination, Juxtaposition
C8) Favour spans with higher ranking coreferring NPs, taking 1st =1,2nd =0.9,
into account a focus rank of noun phrases: 1st >2nd >3rd >none 3rd =0.8,none=0.7

Table 1: Constraints on clause structuring.

order to obtain the optimal tree, the algorithm is allowed to
backtrack once it has reached a goal and explore alternative
syntactic trees, up to a fixed limit set to ensure computa-
tional efficiency.
Once the clause-discourse structuring is finished, the re-
construction of each segment takes place, which transforms
each segment into a complete independent sentence using
a set of rules that add a missing subject or verb, conjugate
verbs in non-finite clauses, remove initial markers, or change
the order of constituents.
4.2 Evaluation experiments
We present the evaluation of the most relevant stages of
our simplification module, i.e., segmentation (as it is the
basis for clause structuring and sentence reconstruction),
coreference (as it is one of the outputs for the simplifica-
tion module) and clause structuring (as it is the basis for
our discourse structuring approach).
Evaluation of the segmentation
We manually constructed a gold standard corpus for the
segmentation task totalling 1011 claims and 6723 segments
in the Optical Recording Devices domain and 486 claims and
3101 segments in the Machine Tools domain. Each claim
was segmented by two independent annotators, who then
discussed their differences and reached a consensus on the
correct segmentation.
We experimented with both rule-based and machine learn-
ing segmentation. Thus, we applied Weka’s J48 decision
tree learner [17] on a vector of basic features comprising
POS, single keyword and punctuation information for pre-
vious, current and next token using cross-validation on 581
claims (3942 segments) of our gold standard in the Optical
Recording Devices domain. For the rule-based approach, we
experimented with a variety of strategies on a test corpus
from the gold standard. We found the strategy that yields
the best results used the following information: semi-colon,
comma, and about twenty representative lexical markers and
expressions of the patent domain such as in which, charac-
terized in that, so as to, and other more ambiguous ones
such as and, for, by when followed by a verb phrase. We
used a strict evaluation that counts 1:1 alignments. The re-
sults are shown in Table 2. The machine learning results are
close to the rule-based results and will probably improve the
segmentation given richer information such as chunking and
multi-word keywords.
Evaluation of the coreference resolution
We evaluated our coreference resolution approach on a set of
30 claims, 15 from the Optical Recording Devices domain,
and 15 from the Machine Tools domain, evenly selected from
the set of independent and dependent claims and manually
annotated for coreference. The results presented in Table 3
show a precision of 83% and a recall of 79%—which rein-
forces the observation of NP repetition in patent material.
We performed an error analysis and found the following main
types of errors:
Chunking errors. The chunker failed to mark a chunk as
an NP, resulting in a false negative.
NP modifier. Identical NPs used as modifiers in a more
complex NP were marked as coreferring while they
were not—for example, inner surface of the substrate
and inner surface of the boot.
Abstract NPs. Abstract nouns like information or direc-
tion are often repeated within a claim but do not core-
fer.
Partial match. Some co-referring NPs such as rotary valve
assembly and valve assembly are not an exact match
and thus are not marked as co-referring,
Evaluation of clause structuring
We performed the evaluation of clause structuring on our
development and test corpus using as input the raw claims
and the claims manually segmented and coreferenced (i.e,
perfect input). Our baseline performs clause structuring
based on right branching given the number of segments in
the gold standard. For the evaluation, we count the number
of identical spans between the automatic and the manual
structuring, excluding the top span as this would always be
counted as correct. In order to be able to compare spans, we
automatically map each segment of the raw input to its cor-
responding gold standard segment. The results of evaluation
 # manual # automatic #1:1 Prec Rec F-score
Development corpus, optical recordings:
Rule-based 3942 3522 2509 71% 63% 66%
J48 3942 3411 2217 64% 56% 59%
Test corpus, machine tools:
Rule-based 3101 2807 1867 66% 60% 62%
J48 3101 2606 1639 62% 52% 56%
Test corpus, optical recordings:
Rule-based 2781 2535 1664 65% 59% 61%
J48 2781 2352 1521 64% 54% 58%

Table 2: Evaluation results for segmentation (# = number of segments)

#automatic #manual #correct Precision Recall F-score

Machine Tools 106 118 93 87% 78% 82%
Optical Recordings 84 81 66 78% 81% 79%
Total 190 199 159 83% 79% 81%

Table 3: Evaluation results for coreference (# = number of corefering NPs)

with the test corpus are shown in Table 4. In the develop-
ment corpus (i.e., 8 claims, 104 segments), we achieved an
F-score of 62% with raw input in the Optical Recording De-
vices domain, whilst in the test corpus, our F-score is 42%
for corresponding input and domain as shown in the table.
Our best score is achieved in the Optical Recording Devices
domain—the same domain as the development corpus—with
an F-score of 61% with perfect input whilst clause structur-
ing in the same domain achieves 45% from raw input and
32% with the right branching strategy.
In order to find out about the contribution of each con-
straint defined in Table 1 to the overall performance, we
ran nine rounds of the evaluation with the perfect input in
both domains, each time omitting one of the constraints.
The F-scores of these rounds are presented in Figure 3, with
label none referring to the situation where no constraints
are omitted, and label all to the situation where all con-
straints are omitted. Not surprisingly, the constraint that
contributes most to the overall performance in both domains
is right branching. On the other hand, S1 coord and same
syntagm in the Optical Recording Devices domain and S2
coord and same subordinator in the Machine Tools domain
do not contribute to the overall performance.
4.3 Discourse structure based summarization
Discourse structure based summarization has been tackled
originally by Marcu [6] by pruning the satellites of an RST
tree in order to obtain a summary of the desired length. In
our approach, the discourse structure is pruned according to
the following three criteria:
Depth: all spans above a given depth are preserved (ex-
pressed in percentage).
Discourse relations: a list of discourse relations can be
provided so that the discourse summarizer prunes the
spans whose relations are in the list, starting with the
first one on that list. A sample hierarchy is:
PURPOSE>MEANS>ELABORATION-OBJECT-
ATTRIBUTE>ELABORATION-LOCATION
This means that ELABORATION-LOCATION spans
can be eliminated before ELABORATION-OBJECT-
ATTRIBUTE spans. In their own turn, ELABORATI-
ON-OBJECT-ATTRIBUTE spans can eliminated be-
fore MEANS spans which can be eliminated before
PURPOSE spans.
Discourse markers: a list of discourse markers at the be-
ginning of spans that can be considered for elimination
is provided in descending order. A sample hierarchy
is: WHEN > BY > FOR.
The system can be configured such that any combination
of the three criteria can be selected and the criteria can be
applied in any order desired. In other words, the discourse
summarization algorithm will apply one criterion after an-
other and stop once it has reached the desired summariza-
tion rate. As an example, we show the discourse summariza-
tion of claim example (1) whose abbreviated RST discourse
structure in Figure 4 shows a maximum depth of 4, and
where nucleus spans are indicated by solid lines and satel-
lite spans by dashed lines. The required summarization rate
is 50%, and the criteria to apply are the depth of 50% (that
is of up to 2 levels in our example), followed by discourse
relation based pruning given the partial order above. The
depth criterion eliminates segments S5,S7,S11,S17,S18 and
S20 whilst the discourse relation criterion eliminates S9,S10
and S14, thus satisfying the 50% summarization rate.
(1) [An optical disk drive comprising: a laser light
source]S1 [for emitting a laser beam;]S2 [an optical
system]S3 [for conversing the laser beam from the
laser light source on a signal plane of optical disk]S4
[on which signal marks are formed]S5 [and for trans-
mitting the light]S6 [reflected from the signal plane;]S7
[one or more optical componentsS8 [arranged in the
optical path between the laser light source and the
optical disk]S9 [for making the distribution of the
laser beam converged by the conversing means]S10
[located on a ring belt just after the passage of an
aperture plane of the optical system;]S11 [a detec-
tion means]S12 [for detecting the light]S13 [reflected
 #automatic #manual #correct Prec Rec F-score
Gold standard MT 112 113 58 51% 51% 51%
OR 89 91 56 62% 61% 61%
Total 201 204 114 56% 55% 55%
Raw MT 82 113 40 48% 35% 40%
OR 61 91 35 57% 38% 45%
Total 143 204 75 52% 36% 42%
Baseline MT 123 113 47 38% 41% 39%
OR 104 91 32 30% 35% 32%
Total 227 204 79 34% 38% 35%

Table 4: Performance of clause structuring on the test corpus(# = number of spans)

Figure 3: Performance of clause structuring with constraint omission from perfect input in both domains

Figure 4: The (abbreviated) discourse structure for the claim in (1)

 from the optical disk;]S14 [and a signal processing
circuit]S15 [for generating a secondary differential sig-
nal]S16 [by differentiating the signals]S17 [detected
by the detection means]S18 [and for detecting the
edge positions of the signal marks]S19 [by compar-
ing the secondary differential signal with a detection
level.]S20
5. DEEP PARAPHRASING AND SUMMA-
RIZATION
Deep paraphrasing and multilingual summarization in PA-
TExpert are performed in the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT)
framework [7]. MTT is a very popular linguistic theory, in
text generation, which is mainly due to two of its principal
features: (i) the use of dependency (instead of constituency)
structures and (ii) the use of a multistratal (a series of lev-
els of representation) language model. These features are
equally valuable for the tasks of deep paraphrasing and sum-
marization as we can abstract from the idiosyncracies of a
particular language by using a higher level structure (for
more details see [16]), more specifically, by starting the re-
generation process of each “repaired” segment from the Deep
Syntactic Structure (DSyntS) of the MTT model.
As illustrated in Figure 1, the stage of deep paraphrasing
and summarization consists of the following three substages:
(i) a preprocessing stage which consists of dependency pars-
ing and mapping to DSyntS, (ii) DSynt summarization (if a
summary rather than a paraphrase is desired), (iii) genera-
tion proper (from a pruned DSyntS in case of summarization
and from the original DSyntS in the case of paraphrasing).
In the case of the generation in another language, prior to
(iii) structure transfer takes place. Let us focus in what
follows on (i)–(iii).
5.1 Preprocessing
The preprocessing stage produces a DSyntS for each “re-
paired” segment. First, the segment is parsed using the off-
the-shelf dependency parser Minipar [4]. Minipar has been
chosen because it produces syntactic structures that can be
mapped onto Surface Syntactic Structures (or SSyntSs) of
the MTT model. Due to the theoretical divergences be-
tween Minipar and the MTT framework, the Minipar-to-
SSyntS conversion is not straightforward. The current ver-
sion of the Minipar-SSyntS conversion grammar contains 137
rules [16]. Its evaluation on 1324 sentences has shown that
99% of well-formed Minipar-structures are correctly mapped
onto SSyntSs. The SSyntSs are, in their turn, mapped onto
DSyntSs.
5.2 Deep Summarization
A small set of summarization criteria is based on specific
patterns recognized within the input DSyntSs, taking into
account discourse and dependency structure information.
Consider some of these patterns and the effect of the ap-
plication of the corresponding summarization rules, namely
removing of the chunks (in reality, branches of the DSyntS)
that appear in square brackets:4
1. A noun has a postponed attribute:
(a) The optical component is a shading member [arranged
near the optical axis around the aperture plane of the optical
4
For further details on deep-syntactic summarization, see
[8].
system].
(b) The recesses are formed in the upper face and extend
from a land surface [adjacent to said cutting edge].
2. A definite noun is modified by a full statement:
(a) An automatic focusing apparatus comprises the actuator
[which controls the focusing means depending upon the out-
put of the phase detector].
3. A noun in a dependent claim is modified by a has-part
relation (in an independent claim, it can bear important in-
formation):
(a) A unitary ridge is formed on the top face [having side
surfaces constituting the first and second side chip deflector
surfaces].
4. A noun in a dependent claim is modified by a PURPOSE
relation (for + Gerund):
(a) The apparatus comprises a lens [for converting the light
from the signal plane].
5. A number appears in a sentence of a dependent claim:
(a) The reflective component-containing layer has a film thick-
ness of 0.01m to 0.5 m.
(b) [The film thickness is 0.01m to 0.09 m].
5.3 Generation proper
The (re)generation starts from the pruned DSyntSs. It
consists of the following four major substages:
(i) aggregation of repetitive and isolated fragments of the
DSyntS,
(ii) introduction of discourse markers to the SSyntS,
(iii) generation of referring expressions (anaphoric refer-
ences) in the SSyntS,
(iv) syntactic generation.
The final result after these four substages conveys in the
case of paraphrasing either absolutely the same information
as the original (but which is much easier to comprehend as
the original) and in the case of summarization the essen-
tials of the information of the original. In what follows we
describe each of these stages.
Aggregation
Aggregation is the fusion of several separate sentence or
phrase structures that share common parts into one struc-
ture in which the previously common parts occur only once.
The main criterion for allowing two sentences to be aggre-
gated is their coreference. For illustration, consider the fol-
lowing aggregation rule and its application to a part of a
simplified claim:
[X(id=n) Yverb Z1] + [X(id=n) Yverb Z2]
+...+ [X(id=n) Yverb Zn]
--> X Yverb [Z1 and Z2 and ... and Zn]
For example:
1 [An optical disk drive]X [comprises]Y [a laser
light source]Z 1.
2 [[An optical disk drive]X [comprises]Y [an opti-
cal system]Z 2. Becomes:
(1+2) An optical disk drive comprises a laser light
source and an optical system.
Discourse marker insertion
In order to improve the readability of the aggregated text,
some rules add discourse markers to the top verb of the
SSyntS. Depending on the discourse relation which is in-
troduced during the simplification stage, the marker can be
retrieved from a discourse-marker dictionary.
Referring expression generation
This stage is essentially rule-based. For example we have
a rule that introduces a relative pronoun as subject of a
sentence if it is coreferring with the object of the previous
sentence. Two further restrictions apply to this rule: 1) the
phrase to become the relative clause must not be syntacti-
cally “too heavy” (i.e., contain “too many” nodes); if it is, the
introduction of a deictic is preferred, and 2) the rule does not
apply either if the object of the first sentence has undergone
aggregation so as not to rebuild sentences that would be
very long and potentially ambiguous (e.g., the aggregation
might result in a coordination of noun phrases which would
make the following relative clause ambiguous). “Too many”
is an empirical figure. Currently, we experiment with 15 to
20 nodes, depdending on the complexity of the structure.
Syntactic generation
This stage is responsible for completing the syntactic genera-
tion, realizing agreement, word order, any necessary elisions
and other surface morphological phenomena, punctuation
and finally getting the word forms to include in the surface
text.
5.4 Evaluation of Summarization and Gener-
ation
Given that no reliable unique evaluation metrics exists
as yet for multilingual summarization and paraphrasis, we
performed a preliminary evaluation of our strategy of multi-
lingual summarization from the perspective of the quality of
the summary and from the perspective of the quality of the
multilinguality. The evaluation of the quality of our sum-
mary has been performed using ROUGE [3]. As baseline,
we used the MS Word automatic summarizer (MSAS), with
the summarization parameter set to 50%. Out of a list of
50 patents that underwent simplification, 30 were randomly
selected and summarized with our regeneration module and
MSAS. The summaries used as reference have been done by
a patent specialist. Our summarization obtained an overall
f-score of 61% over quadrigrams and trigrams, while MSAS
reached 43%. That we did not surpass 61% can be par-
tially explained by the object/method dichotomy in some
patent claims, which we cannot identify reliably in an auto-
matic way. If a patent claim section contains claims refer-
ring to both the invented object and the method of apply-
ing this object, both kinds of claims tend to contain largely
the same information. Human created reference summaries
avoid the repetition of this information, whilst our module
is currently not able to differentiate an object-related claim
from a method-related one. Furthermore, it is worth noting
that the evaluation that has been carried out so far does
not take into account the quality of the text, for which a
qualitative evaluation would be necessary.
For the evaluation of the quality of the multilinguality, we
chose human evaluation in order to balance the purely statis-
tical metrics of the ROUGE evaluation and to obtain some
objective opinions from native speakers and experts. For
baseline regeneration
Intelligibility 49 58
Simplicity 49 74
Accuracy 47 51
Table 5: Accuracy of the PATExpert Multilingual
Summarizer (regeneration) against a Google Trans-
lator (baseline)
this purpose, six native speakers were asked to rate twelve
different claim descriptions in their native tongue produced
by PATExpert with summarization switched off (such that
only simplification, transfer and regeneration were effective)
against the online-Google translation of the original claims
as baseline.5 Given that the recall of our multilingual gener-
ator is still very much hampered by the shortage of multilin-
gual resources, we consider this evaluation a general indica-
tion of the potential of “deep” translation techniques when
combined with the preprocessing of the claims. The evalu-
ation was based on a questionnaire which has been largely
inspired by [9]. It consists of three categories: “intelligibil-
ity”, “simplicity” and “accuracy”. The first two categories
deal with the quality of the transferred text; both have
a five value scale. The third category, which has a seven
value scale, captures how the content from the English in-
put is conveyed in the transferred text. Due to the lack of
space, we do not cite here the questionnaire itself. Table 5
shows the accuracy regarding each of the three quality cat-
egories for regeneration and for the baseline. As expected,
the complexity of our multilingual summarization module
is much lower, hence the intelligibility is about 9% higher.
But surprisingly, there is no significant difference regarding
the accuracy of the two translations, which might show that
no meaningful information is lost during the simplification
stage compared to a non-simplified output.
6. RELATED WORK
Shinmori et al. [13] address the simplification of Japanese
claim sentences. Their rule-based approach first identifies
the claim’s coarse-grained discourse structure with patent
specific relations such as procedure and precondition
for process-style and jepson-style claims respectively using
cue phrases and grammatical patterns, and then paraphrases
each discourse segment.
Sheremetyeva [12] proposes a parsing methodology that
is tuned to the analysis of original US patent claims. The
resulting analysis structure is a syntactic dependency tree.
The intermediate chunking structure of the parse is used for
generation of simple sentences (with the goal to improve the
readability of the claims).
Some work has also been done on the shallow extractive
summarization of legal texts [1, 2]. These approaches rely
on the text type specific discourse/thematic structure, and
in the case of [2], on general and specialized shallow features
such as tf*idf, location, sentence length, quotations and cue
phrases. Given the highly repetitive nature of patent claim
sentences and their overly long sentences as well as the lack
of corpus of patent claims aligned with summaries, the use
5
Since our goal was to evaluate the multilingual output of
our system with the original claims as input, we consider it
correct to run the Google translator on the original claims.
of such shallow features is not possible. For this reason as
well as for the generation of multilingual summaries, we have
chosen a deep summarization approach.
7. CONCLUSION
We have presented a system that uses shallow and deep
summarization and paraphrasing techniques to produce para-
phrases and multilingual summaries of patent claims. The
efectiveness of the different summarization and paraphras-
ing strategies needs still to be formally evaluated with patent
experts and users who are not trained in patent information
process. Informal talks with patent experts confirmed the
benefits of claim dependency structure based summariza-
tion. On the other hand, some specific discourse summa-
rization strategies might be needed: for example, a pur-
pose followed by a means relation expresses important in-
formation; likewise, an elaboration relation starting with
the cue phrase in which is also important and shall not be
pruned. As far as paraphrasing and deep summarization are
concerned, our prototypical technique proved useful. How-
ever, further research is needed, for instance, to establish
more profound summarization criteria. Another topic is to
extend the summarization to other sections of patents.
Given that other genres of legal discourse (such as, e.g.,
laws) tend to be equally difficult to read and comprehend by
non-experts in the field, paraphrasing and summarization
(gist generation) techniques such as the ones presented in
this paper could serve as a blueprint for further analogous
applications.
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Annex: Example
In what follows, we present first an original claim and then
two PATExpert summaries (in English and French) thereof.
Original claim
An optical disk drive comprising: a laser light source
for emitting a laser beam; an optical system for con-
versing the laser beam from the laser light source on a
signal plane of optical disk on which signal marks are
formed and for transmitting the light reflected from the
signal plane; one or more optical components arranged
in the optical path between the laser light source and
the optical disk for making the distribution of the laser
beam converged by the conversing means located on a
ring belt just after the passage of an aperture plane
of the optical system; a detection means for detecting
the light reflected from the optical disk; and a signal
processing circuit for generating a secondary differen-
tial signal by differentiating the signals detected by the
detection means and for detecting the edge positions
of the signal marks by comparing the secondary differ-
ential signal with a detection level.
PATExpert generated summaries
An optical disk drive comprises a laser light source, an
optical system, a detection means, and a signal pro-
cessing circuit. The laser light source emits a laser
beam. The optical system converses the laser beam
from the laser light source on a signal plane of optical
disk and transmits the light. The optical disk drive
also comprises one or more optical components. It is
arranged in the optical path between the laser light
source and the optical disk. The detection means de-
tects the light. The signal processing circuit generates
a secondary differential signal and detects the edge po-
sitions of the signal mark.

Une unité de disque optique comprend une source de

lumière laser, un systme optique, un système de détec-
tion, et un circuit de traitement de signal. La source
de lumière laser émet un faisceau laser. Le système
optique inverse le faisceau laser de la source de lu-
mière laser sur un plan de signal de disque optique
et transmet la lumière. Lunité de disque optique com-
prend également un ou plusieurs composants optiques.
Il est arrangé dans le chemin optique entre la source
de lumière laser et le disque optique. Le système de
détection détecte la lumière. Le circuit de traitement
de signal génère un signal de différentiel secondaire et
détecte les positions de bord de la marque de signal.