@inproceedings{xu-ashley-2025-label,
    title = "Label-Free Distinctiveness: Building a Continuous Trademark Scale via Synthetic Anchors",
    author = "Xu, Huihui  and
      Ashley, Kevin D.",
    editor = "Aletras, Nikolaos  and
      Chalkidis, Ilias  and
      Barrett, Leslie  and
      Goanț{\u{a}}, C{\u{a}}t{\u{a}}lina  and
      Preoțiuc-Pietro, Daniel  and
      Spanakis, Gerasimos",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.nllp-1.8/",
    pages = "113--124",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-338-8",
    abstract = "Trademark law protects distinctive marks that are able to identify and distinguish goods or services. The Abercrombie spectrum classifies marks from generic to fanciful based on distinctiveness. The Abercrombie spectrum employs hard buckets while the real world ofbranding rarely falls into neat bins: marks often hover at the blurry border between ``descriptive'' and ``suggestive'' for example. Byrequiring trademark examiners or researchers to pick one of the five buckets, one loses useful information where the lines get blurry. Sohard boundaries obscure valuable gradations of meaning. In this work, we explore creating a continuous ruler of distinctiveness asa complementary diagnostic tool to the original buckets. The result is a label-free ladder, where every mark, real or synthetic, gets a real-valued score. These continuous scores reveal subtle distinctions among marks and provide interpretable visualizations that help practitioners understand where a mark falls relative to established anchors. Testing with 95 expert-classified trademark examples achieves a Spearman{'}s {\ensuremath{\rho}} = 0.718 and Pearson{'}s r = 0.724 against human labels, while offering intuitive visualizations on the continuous spectrum. Ademo can be found at https://distinctiveness-ruler-demo.streamlit.app/."
}