This second edition provides a systematic introduction to the work and views of the emerging patent-search research and innovation communities as well as an overview of what has been achieved and, perhaps even more importantly, of what remains to be achieved. It revises many of the contributions of the first edition and adds a significant number of new ones. The first part “Introduction to Patent Searching” includes two overview chapters on the peculiarities of patent searching and on contemporary search technology respectively, and thus sets the scene for the subsequent parts. The second part on “Evaluating Patent Retrieval” then begins with two chapters dedicated to patent evaluation campaigns, followed by two chapters discussing complementary issues from the perspective of patent searchers and from the perspective of related domains, notably legal search. “High Recall Search” includes four completely new chapters dealing with the issue of finding only the relevant documents in a reasonable time span. The last (and with six papers the largest) part on “Special Topics in Patent Information Retrieval” covers a large spectrum of research in the patent field, from classification and image processing to translation. Lastly, the book is completed by an outlook on open issues and future research. Several of the chapters have been jointly written by intellectual property and information retrieval experts. However, members of both communities with a background different to that of the primary author have reviewed the chapters, making the book accessible to both the patent search community and to the information retrieval research community. It also not only offers the latest findings for academic researchers, but is also a valuable resource for IP professionals wanting to learn about current IR approaches in the patent domain.

Patents form an important knowledge resource –much technical information represented in patents is not represented in scientific literature – and at the same time they are important, and economically highly relevant, legal documents. Between 1998 and 2008, the number of patent applications filed yearly worldwide grew by more than 50 percent. Yet still we see a huge gap between, on the one hand, the technologies that emerged from research labs and are in use in major Internet search engines or in enterprise search systems, and, on the other hand, the systems used daily by the patent search communities. In the past few years, the editors have organized a series of events at the Information Retrieval Facility in Vienna, Austria, bringing together leading researchers in information retrieval (IR) and those who practice and use patent search, thus establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between the IR and the intellectual property (IP) communities and creating a discursive as well as empirical space for sustainable discussion and innovation. This book is among the results of that joint effort. Many of the chapters were written jointly by IP and IR experts, while all chapters were reviewed by representatives of both communities, resulting in contributions that foster the proliferation and exchange of knowledge across fields and disciplinary mindsets. Reflecting the efforts and views of both sides of the emerging patent search research and innovation community, this is a carefully selected, organized introduction to what has been achieved, and perhaps even more significantly to what remains to be achieved. The book is a valuable resource for IR researchers and IP professionals who are looking for a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in this domain.

Patent Retrieval addresses the question of how research and technology in the field of Information Retrieval assists, or even changes the processes of patent search. It is a survey of work done on patent data in relation to Information Retrieval in the last 20 to 25 years.

This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web, todays smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life. Key to the success of the NTCIR endeavor was early recognition that information access research is an empirical discipline and that evaluation therefore lay at the core of the enterprise. Evaluation is thus at the heart of each chapter in this book. They show, for example, how the recognition that some documents are more important than others has shaped thinking about evaluation design. The thirty-three contributors to this volume speak for the many hundreds of researchers from dozens of countries around the world who together shaped NTCIR as organizers and participants. This book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and students--anyone who wants to learn about past and present evaluation efforts in information retrieval, information access, and natural language processing, as well as those who want to participate in an evaluation task or even to design and organize one.

This two-volume set LNCS 13185 and 13186 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 44th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2022, held in April 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 35 full papers presented together with 11 reproducibility papers, 13 CLEF lab descriptions papers, 12 doctoral consortium papers, 5 workshop abstracts, and 4 tutorials abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 395 submissions. Chapters “Leveraging Customer Reviews for E-commerce Query Generation” and “End to End Neural Retrieval for Patent Prior Art Search” are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This completely revised and expanded edition recognises the growing importance of patent systems and documentation from Asia, South America and Africa. The most prominent patent systems from these regions are treated individually, together with revisions to existing country coverage and an overview of IP developments in general. This is an essential reference tool for librarians, information specialists, data analysts and others seeking to use patent information either at the document level or in bulk.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Information Retrieval Facility Conference, IRFC 2012, held in Vienna, Austria, July 2-3, 2012. The 12 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 17 high-quality submissions. IRF conferences wish to bring young researchers into contact with industry at an early stage. This fifth conference aimed to tackle four complementary research areas: information retrieval, machine translations for search solutions, and interactive information access. The papers are organized into topical sections on patent search, Web search, applications, and query formulation and analysis.