Sparse Coverage: Semantic Center Representations for Patent Prior-Art Retrieval

Sparse Coverage is an unsupervised semantic retrieval framework designed for patent prior‑art search. It maps local span embeddings to a sparse vocabulary of embedding‑space centers chosen via a coverage‑oriented k‑center objective, allowing spans to activate nearby centers and produce sparse representations that work with inverted‑index retrieval. Experiments on CLEF‑IP 2013 demonstrate that Sparse Coverage matches or surpasses dense patent encoders in document‑level recall while remaining competitive at the passage level, making it an effective first‑stage retrieval approach for patent search.

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