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Measuring and Improving Access to the Corpus

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Current Challenges in Patent Information Retrieval

Part of the book series: The Information Retrieval Series ((INRE,volume 29))

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Abstract

Retrievability is a measure of access that quantifies how easily documents can be found using a retrieval system. Such a measure is of particular interest within the patent domain, because if a retrieval system makes some patents hard to find, then patent searchers will have a difficult time retrieving these patents. This may mean that a patent searcher could miss important and relevant patents because of the retrieval system. In this chapter, we describe measures of retrievability and how they can be applied to measure the overall access to a collection given a retrieval system. We then identify three features of best-match retrieval models that are hypothesised to lead to an improvement in access to all documents in the collection: sensitivity to term frequency, length normalization and convexity. Since patent searchers tend to favour Boolean models over best-match models, hybrid retrieval models are proposed that incorporate these features while preserving the desirable aspects of the traditional Boolean model. An empirical study conducted on four large patent corpora demonstrates that these hybrid models provide better access to the corpus of patents than the traditional Boolean model.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Paradoxically the output of such a model is either 1 or 0 and this contains less information than the real number yielded by best-match models.

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Acknowledgements

This work described in this chapter was supported and partly funded by Matrixware. I would like to thank the Information Retrieval Facility for their computation services. I would also like to thank Leif Azzopardi, Tamara Polajnar, Richard Glassey and Desmond Elliott for their helpful comments and suggestions on how to improve this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G4 1XH, Scotland, UK

    Richard Bache

Authors
  1. Richard Bache
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Correspondence to Richard Bache .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information Retrieval Facility, Donau-City Straße 1, Vienna, 1220, Austria

    Mihai Lupu

  2. Information Retrieval Facility, Donau-City Straße 1, Vienna, 1220, Austria

    Katja Mayer

  3. Information Retrieval Facility, Donau-City Straße 1, Vienna, 1220, Austria

    John Tait

  4. 3LP Advisors, Post Rd. 7003, Dublin, 43016, Ohio, USA

    Anthony J. Trippe

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Bache, R. (2011). Measuring and Improving Access to the Corpus. In: Lupu, M., Mayer, K., Tait, J., Trippe, A. (eds) Current Challenges in Patent Information Retrieval. The Information Retrieval Series, vol 29. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19231-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19231-9_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-19230-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-19231-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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