CLEF-IP 2009: retrieval experiments in the intellectual property domain

The CLEF-IP track ran for the first time within CLEF 2009. The purpose of the track was twofold: to encourage and facilitate research in the area of patent retrieval by providing a large clean data set for experimentation; to create a large test collection of patents in the three main European languages for the evaluation of cross-lingual information access. The track focused on the task of prior art search. The 15 European teams who participated in the track deployed a rich range of Information Retrieval techniques adapting them to this new specific domain and task. A large-scale test collection for evaluation purposes was created by exploiting patent citations.