Towards Better Evaluation for Generated Patent Claims

Lekang Jiang, Pascal A. Scherz, Stefan Goetz


Abstract
Patent claims define the scope of protection and establish the legal boundaries of an invention. Drafting these claims is a complex and time-consuming process that usually requires the expertise of skilled patent attorneys, which can form a large access barrier for many small enterprises. To solve these challenges, researchers have investigated large language models (LLMs) for automating patent claim generation. However, existing studies highlight inconsistencies between automated evaluation metrics and human expert assessments. To bridge this gap, we introduce Patent-CE, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating patent claims. Patent-CE includes comparative claim evaluations annotated by patent experts, focusing on five key criteria: feature completeness, conceptual clarity, terminology consistency, logical linkage, and overall quality. Additionally, we propose PatClaimEval, a novel multi-dimensional evaluation method specifically designed for patent claims. Our experiments demonstrate that PatClaimEval achieves the highest correlation with human expert evaluations across all assessment criteria among all tested metrics. This research provides the groundwork for more accurate evaluations of automated patent claim generation systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.190
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3775–3788
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.190/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lekang Jiang, Pascal A. Scherz, and Stefan Goetz. 2025. Towards Better Evaluation for Generated Patent Claims. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3775–3788, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Better Evaluation for Generated Patent Claims (Jiang et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.190.pdf