PEDANTIC: A Dataset for the Automatic Examination of Definiteness in Patent Claims

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Patent claims define the scope of protection for an invention. If there are ambiguities in a claim, it is rejected by the patent office. In the US, this is referred to as indefiniteness (35 U.S.C § 112(b)) and is among the most frequent reasons for patent application rejection. The development of automatic methods for patent definiteness examination has the potential to make patent drafting and examination more efficient, but no annotated dataset has been published to date. We introduce PEDANTIC (Patent Definiteness Examination Corpus), a novel dataset of 14k US patent claims from patent applications relating to Natural Language Processing (NLP), annotated with reasons for indefiniteness. We construct PEDANTIC using a fully automatic pipeline that retrieves office action documents from the USPTO and uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract the reasons for indefiniteness. A human validation study confirms the pipeline’s accuracy in generating high-quality annotations. To gain insight beyond binary classification metrics, we implement an LLM-as-Judge evaluation that compares the free-form reasoning of every model-cited reason with every examiner-cited reason. We show that LLM agents based on Qwen 2.5 32B and 72B struggle to outperform logistic regression baselines on definiteness prediction, even though they often correctly identify the underlying reasons. PEDANTIC provides a valuable resource for patent AI researchers, enabling the development of advanced examination models. We release the dataset and code at https://github.com/boschresearch/pedantic-patentsemtech.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication6th Workshop on Patent Text Mining and Semantic Technologies (PatentSemTech)
Pages21-38
Number of pages18
Volume4062
Publication statusPublished - 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesCEUR Workshop Proceedings
ISSN1613-0073

Workshop

Title6th Workshop on Patent Text Mining and Semantic Technologies
Abbreviated titlePatentSemTech 2025
Conference number6
Descriptionheld in conjunction with 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2025)
Duration17 July 2025
Website
LocationPadova Congress center
CityPadova
CountryItaly

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-5410-218X/work/198595065

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • Patent AI, Patent Clarity, Patent Classification, Patent Definiteness, Patent Examination