1984 Reports

Putting Pieces Together: Understanding Patent Abstracts

Lebowitz, Michael

One aspect of the development of RESEARCHER (Lebowitz 83a), an intelligent information system that reads, remembers and learns from patent abstracts, is the use of strongly semantic-based text understanding methods. We show in this paper how patent abstracts can be processed by using only very simple syntactic rules to identify "pieces" of the ultimate representation and then "putting the pieces together." An example of RESEARCHER processing a sample abstract is shown.