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The processing of intellectual property documents, such as patents, has been important to the industry, business, and law communities. Recently, the importance of patent processing has also been recognized in academic research communities, particularly by information retrieval and natural language processing researchers. In addition, large test collections that include patents have recently become available, to enable the systematic evaluation of methodologies from a scientific point of view. In the light of these activities, this special issue is intended to collect advanced research papers on patent processing. As an introduction to the special issue on patent processing, this paper surveys the relevant literature and outlines the papers selected for the special issue. Keywords: Patent processing; Information retrieval, Classification; Citation analysis; Natural language processing

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2004.08.012 Byline: Makoto Iwayama (a), Atsushi Fujii (b), Noriko Kando (c), Yozo Marukawa (c) Keywords: Test collections; Patent retrieval; Retrieval models Abstract: Reflecting the rapid growth in the utilization of large test collections for information retrieval since the 1990s, extensive comparative experiments have been performed to explore the effectiveness of various retrieval models. However, most collections were intended for retrieving newspaper articles and technical abstracts. In this paper, we describe the process of producing a test collection for patent retrieval, the NTCIR-3 Patent Retrieval Collection, which includes two years of Japanese patent applications and 31 topics produced by professional patent searchers. We also report experimental results obtained by using this collection to re-examine the effectiveness of existing retrieval models in the context of patent retrieval. The relative superiority among existing retrieval models did not significantly differ depending on the document genre, that is, patents and newspaper articles. Issues related to patent retrieval are also discussed. Author Affiliation: (a) Hitachi, Ltd., 1-280 Higashi-Koigakubo, Kokubunji 185-8601, Japan (b) Graduate School of Library, Information and Media Studies, University of Tsukuba, 1-2 Kasuga, Tsukuba 305-8550, Japan (c) National Institute of Informatics, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku 101-8430, Japan Article History: Received 15 March 2004; Accepted 31 August 2004

This introductory paper covers not only the research content of the articles in this special issue of IP&M but attempts to characterize the state-of-the-art in the Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) domain. We present our view of some major directions for CLIR research in the future. In particular, we find that insufficient attention has been given to the Web as a resource for multilingual research, and to languages which are spoken by hundreds of millions of people in the world but have been mainly neglected by the CLIR research community. In addition, we find that most CLIR evaluation has focussed narrowly on the news genre to the exclusion of other important genres such as scientific and technical literature. The paper concludes by describing an ambitious 5-year research plan proposed by James Mayfield and Paul McNamee. Keywords: Cross-Language Information Retrieval; System evaluation campaigns; Research roadmap