Product vs Process U.S. Patent Claim Classifier • patccatClaims

Rule-based classifier that labels U.S. patent claims as product or process and extracts claim-structure flags (means-plus-function, Jepson, Beauregard, single-line, and others), using udpipe part-of-speech tags. It is the core classifier of the patccat pipeline, packaged for standalone use.

Install

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("bganglmair/patccatClaims")

From a local copy of the source, remotes::install_local("patccatClaims") also works.

Quick start

library(patccatClaims)

## one-time: download + cache the pinned udpipe POS model
patccat_load_model()

## `data` is one row per claim line, with columns for the claim key, text,
## structural level, sequence, and a row id.
out <- patccat_classify(
  data, varPatentClaim = "PatentClaim", varText = "text",
  varLevel = "level", varSequence = "sequence", varID = "id")

## `out` has one row per independent claim, with claimType
## (0 = none, 1 = process, 2 = product) and the claim-structure flags.

patccat_classify() is an alias for fn.patccat(); use either.

The POS model

The classifier tags claims with the udpipe English-EWT (ud-2.5-191206) model. That third-party file is not shipped with the package; patccat_load_model() downloads it once into a per-user cache (tools::R_user_dir) and pins the exact build the classifier was validated against.

Validation

The bundled testthat check runs the classifier on a frozen AMT fixture and asserts it reproduces the expected labels and clears an accuracy floor against the human gold. The full 9,830-claim AMT gate lives in the research repository.

Attribution

POS tagging by udpipe (Jan Wijffels), using the Universal Dependencies English-EWT treebank.

Acknowledgements

The R-package scaffolding, documentation, and repository and release setup were done with assistance from Anthropic’s Claude (Cowork). The classifier and its validation are the authors’ own work.

Citing

If you use this package, please cite it. In R:

citation("patccatClaims")

which gives:

Ganglmair, B., and W. K. Robinson (2026). patccatClaims: Product vs Process U.S. Patent Claim Classifier. R package version 0.1.0. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22697822

@Manual{patccatClaims,
  title  = {patccatClaims: Product vs Process U.S. Patent Claim Classifier},
  author = {Bernhard Ganglmair and W. Keith Robinson},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {R package version 0.1.0},
  doi    = {10.5281/zenodo.22697822},
  url    = {https://github.com/bganglmair/patccatClaims},
}

That DOI is the concept DOI and always resolves to the newest release. To cite one specific release, use that release’s own DOI: version 0.1.0 is 10.5281/zenodo.22697823.

CITATION.cff carries the same information machine-readably, which is what GitHub’s “Cite this repository” link and Zenodo both read.

patccatClaims