Improving the comprehension of legal documentation: the case of patent claims

With their abstract vocabulary and overly long sentences, patent claims, like several other genres of legal discourse, are notoriously difficult to read and comprehend. The enormous number of both native and non-native users reading patent claims on a daily basis raises the demand for means that make them easier and faster to understand. An obvious way to satisfy this demand is to paraphrase the original material, i.e., to rewrite it in a more appropriate style, or---even better---to summarize it in the language of preference of the reader such that the reader can rapidly grasp its essence. PATExpert is a patent processing service which incorporates, among other technologies, paraphrasing and multilingual summarization of patent claims. With the goal to offer the user the most suitable options and to evaluate alternative techniques that are based on different contextual and linguistic criteria, both paraphrasing and summarization implement "surface-oriented" strategies and "deep" strategies. The surface strategies make use of shallow linguistic criteria such as punctuation and syntactic and lexical markers. The deep strategies operate on deep-syntactic structures of the claims, using a full fledged text generator for synthesis of the paraphrase or summary, respectively.