Introduction to the special issue on patent processing

The processing of intellectual property documents, such as patents, has been important to the industry, business, and law communities. Recently, the importance of patent processing has also been recognized in academic research communities, particularly by information retrieval and natural language processing researchers. In addition, large test collections that include patents have recently become available, to enable the systematic evaluation of methodologies from a scientific point of view. In the light of these activities, this special issue is intended to collect advanced research papers on patent processing. As an introduction to the special issue on patent processing, this paper surveys the relevant literature and outlines the papers selected for the special issue.