PaECTER: Patent-level representation learning using citation-informed transformers

Mainak Ghosh, Michael E Rose, Sebastian Erhardt, Erik Buunk and Dietmar Harhoff

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 10, 1-13

Abstract: PaECTER is an open-source document-level encoder specific to patents. We fine-tune BERT for Patents with examiner-added citation information to generate numerical representations for patent documents. PaECTER performs better in similarity tasks than current state-of-the-art models used in the patent domain. More specifically, our model outperforms the patent specific pre-trained language model (BERT for Patents) and general-purpose text embedding models (e.g., E5, GTE, and BGE) on our patent citation prediction test dataset on different rank evaluation metrics. PaECTER predicts at least one most similar patent at a rank of 1.32 on average when compared against 25 irrelevant patents. Numerical representations generated by PaECTER from patent text can be used for downstream tasks such as classification, tracing knowledge flows, or semantic similarity search. Semantic similarity search is especially relevant in the context of prior art search for both inventors and patent examiners.

Date: 2026
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DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0358188

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