Creating a silver standard for patent simplification
Silvia Casola Alberto Lavelli Horacio Saggion
Patents are legal documents that aim at protecting inventions on the one hand
and at making technical knowledge circulate on the other. Their complex style
-- a mix of legal, technical, and extremely vague language -- makes their
content hard to access for humans and machines and poses substantial challenges
to the information retrieval community. This paper proposes an approach to
automatically simplify patent text through rephrasing. Since no in-domain
parallel simplification data exist, we propose a method to automatically
generate a large-scale silver standard for patent sentences. To obtain
candidates, we use a general-domain paraphrasing system; however, the process
is error-prone and difficult to control. Thus, we pair it with proper filters
and construct a cleaner corpus that can successfully be used to train a
simplification system. Human evaluation of the synthetic silver corpus shows
that it is considered grammatical, adequate, and contains simple sentences.