A Horizontal Patent Test Collection

We motivate the need for, and describe the contents of a novel patent research collection, publicly available and for free, covering multimodal and multilingual data from six patent authorities. The new patent test collection complements existing patent test collections, which are vertical (one domain or one authority over many years). Instead, the new collection is horizontal: it includes all technical domains from the major patenting authorities over the relatively short time span of two years. In addition to bringing together documents currently scattered across different test collections, the collection provides, for the first time, Korean documents, to complement those from Europe, US, Japan, and China. This new collection can be used on a variety of tasks beyond traditional information retrieval. We exemplify this with a task of high-relevance today: de-anonymisation.