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<Paper uid="W03-2007">
  <Title>Makoto IWAYAMA</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The importance of intellectual property, specifically patent, is being recognized more than ever. In the academia, patent is being considered as the core component for technology transfer to industry. With the upsurge of business method patents and software patents, more and more business persons are concerned about patent.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Patent is described in patent specification which is a kind of legal documents. The most important part of patent specification is where the claims are written, because &amp;quot;the claims specify the boundaries of the legal monopoly created by the patent&amp;quot; (Burgunder, 1995). Therefore, we believe that patent corpus processing should be centered around patent claim processing.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> It is common that Japanese patent claims are described in one sentence with peculiar style and wording and that they are difficult to read and understand for ordinary people. After surveying related literature and investigating NTCIR3 patent collection (Iwayama et al., 2003), we found the difficulty has two aspects: structural difficulty and term difficulty. null In this paper, we first present the characteristics of patent claims. Next, we present our work on the structure analysis of patent claims. Third, we introduce our on-going research on term explanation for patent claims.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>