The 1^st International Workshop on Advances in Patent Information Retrieval (AsPIRe'10) was collocated with ECIR 2010 on 28 March 2010.

Patent Information Retrieval is a cross cutting research area as it contains domains such as multilingual information retrieval, image processing and retrieval, language processing, and text categorisation, clustering and mining. The main goal of the workshop is to gather scientists from these areas together to foster the collaboration among such interdisciplinary areas and spark discussions on open topics related to Information Retrieval and Machine Translation in the Intellectual Property domain in order to advance the current state-of-the-art of patent search tools.

A collection of 400,000 patent documents - a subset of the MAREC dataset - was made available for download to workshop participants. Read more

In the course of the half day workshop five perspectives on patent related research ranging from Machine Translation over NLP to Evaluation Measures and Retrieval Experiments were presented. The talks stirred vivid discussion among the audience, and for almost every talk there were more questions than there was time for answering them. At the end of the workshop Barrou Diallo, Head of the Research Department of the EPO, gave an introduction to his work at the EPO and wrapped each of the five talks, highlighting the points that seemed to him most important.