The CLEF-IP 2012 Test Collection

CLEF-IP: Cross-Language Evaluation Forum - Intellectual Property The CLEF-IP track ran from 2009 to 2013 and aimed to investigate IR techniques for patent retrieval.The track utilizes a collection of more than 1.3M patent documents (~2.6 million files) derived from EPO (European Patent Office) sources and EuroPCT Applications (more than 400K documents) published by WIPO (World Intelectual Property Organization). The collection contains documents in English, French and German with at least 150,000 documents in each language, all published before 2001.

There were three tasks in 2012: The first one was to find patent documents that are candidates to constitute prior art for a given claim taken from a patent document. The second task, flowchart recognition, asked participants to extract the information in these images and return it in a predefined textual format. The third task, chemical structure regonition, participants had to identify the location of the chemical structures depicted on images of patent pages and, for each of them, return the corresponding structure in a MOL file (a chemical structure file format).