Corpora: CFP - Workshop on Patent Retrieval at SIGIR'2000

[Mun-Kew Leong]

                     CALL for PAPER/PARTICIPATION
                 ACM SIGIR 2000 WORKSHOP on PATENT RETRIEVAL
                             Athens, Greece
                              July 28, 2000

           http://sigir2000.aueb.gr for SIGIR 2000 Conference
     http://www.rd.nacsis.ac.jp/~ntcadm/sigir2000ws/ for this workshop


GOAL of the WORKSHOP

To foster research and development of the technology for patent search and
retrieval by providing a forum in which researchers and practitioners from
relevant communities can share their ideas, approaches, perspectives, and
experiences from their work in progress.

BACKGROUND

The search and retrieval of patent and other Intellectual Property (IP)
documents is important to the scientific, business, and law communities.
In the past, much of the focus for patent and IP retrieval has been from
the database community, and not from the Information Retrieval (IR)
community. This is beginning to change as the unique semantic and syntactic
characteristic of patents and other IP text documents are being addressed.

In addition to the retrieval of documents, other areas of research and
development include the extraction, usage and strategic analysis of the
text documents, automatic summarization, classfication, and comparisons
across related documents. A particular area of internationl interest is
the access of patent and IP documents in a foreign language (i.e., what
is termed cross-language or translingual document retrieval).

This workshop will bring together people interested in patent retrieval
and in better access to patent documents. Participants will be from different
communities including patent offices, patent vendors, professional patent
users, and information retrieval researchers. The aim is to share ideas,
approaches, perspectives, and experiences from their work in progress to
ensure a thorough exploration of their common ground. The goals are:

- to achieve a better understanding of existing systems, of the user
  perspective, and of the usage of the patents genre as well as its
  terminology, ontology, and text structure, and
- to discuss future directions for research and development in patent
  retrieval and appropriate schemes for evaluation, based on the common
  ground.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

existing systems for patent searching and retrieval
research issues in patent retrieval systems using characteristic aspects of the
genre
cross-language access to patent information
ontology, syntax, semantics of patent information
user perspective from genuine patent users
user modeling and user studies by IR researchers
evaluation of patent retrieval systems

FORMAT OF THE WORKSHOP

The workshop will begin with an introductory overview of patent and intellectual
property rights searching, followed by six topic-based sessions. The first five
sessions will deal with; (1) existing systems for patent searching and
retrieval,
(2) research issues in patent retrieval systems using characteristic aspects of
the genre, (3) user perspective from genuine patent users, (4) user modeling and
user studies by IR researchers, and (5) evaluation of patent retrieval systems.
Cross-language access will be included in the second, fourth and fifth sessions.
Each session has both invited speaker(s) and contributed paper(s).

Panel discussions on the design of patent retrieval systems and on the user
aspects are also programmed among the sessions above. Each panel discussion
will start with brief (3 5 minutes) opening remarks from each panelist followed
by a 15 20 minute open forum with the audience. The final session will be a
panel
discussion, in the same format, of ad hoc issues raised during the workshop and
will also explore the way ahead in research and development in patent retrieval
systems.

SUBMISSION/PARTICIPATION

Participation in the workshop is open to all interested parties. Advance notice
to the organizers is not required and the maximum number of participants is not
predefined. Participants are, however, invited to submit a brief position
statement
according to the schedule shown below. Research papers, slides, and position
papers will be put up on the workshop website
(http://www.rd.nacsis.ac.jp/~ntcadm/sigir2000ws/) with the permission of the
authors. All participants are encouraged to read these papers before coming to
the workshop to enhance the interaction. If there is sufficient interest among
the participants, an edited volume or special journal issue may be published
after the workshop.

All participants must register for the workshop with the SIGIR'2000 conference
organization at http://sigir2000.aueb.gr/.

IMPORTANT DATES

June 20, 2000  Abstract submission for research papers and positions papers
June 28, 2000  Notice of acceptance for research papers
June 15, 2000  HTML version for research papers and position papers
July 28, 2000  Patent Retrieval workshop at SIGIR'2000 in Greece

WORKSHOP CHAIRS

Noriko Kando, National Institute of Informatics (NII), Email: kando at nii.ac.jp
Mun-Kew Leong, BIGonthenet.com, Email: munkew.leong at BIGonthenet.com

PAPER SUBMISSION (electronic format is preferred)

Noriko Kando
National Institute of Informatics (NII) (Formerly NACSIS)
Postal Address: 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430 JAPAN
Phone: +81-3-4212-2529
Fax: +81-3-3556-1916
Email: kando at nii.ac.jp

FURTHER INFORMATION

Additional information is available at Patent Retrieval Workshop-Website
(http://www.rd.nacsis.ac.jp/~ntcadm/sigir2000ws/) and enquiries can be sent
directly to any of the organizers above. Information about the workshop
venue can be found at SIGIR Conference website (http://sigir2000.aueb.gr/).