Patents are legal documents that aim at protecting inventions on the one hand
and at making technical knowledge circulate on the other. Their complex style
-- a mix of legal, technical, and extremely vague language -- makes their
content hard to access for humans and machines and poses substantial challenges
to the information retrieval community. This paper proposes an approach to
automatically simplify patent text through rephrasing. Since no in-domain
parallel simplification data exist, we propose a method to automatically
generate a large-scale silver standard for patent sentences. To obtain
candidates, we use a general-domain paraphrasing system; however, the process
is error-prone and difficult to control. Thus, we pair it with proper filters
and construct a cleaner corpus that can successfully be used to train a
simplification system. Human evaluation of the synthetic silver corpus shows
that it is considered grammatical, adequate, and contains simple sentences.

专利是一种旨在保护发明的法律文件，同时也旨在在技术知识流通方面发挥作用。该论文提出了一种通过改写的方法来自动简化专利文本，并提出了一种用于专利句子的大规模银标准自动生成方法。人工评估表明生成的银标准语料库在语法、适应性和句子简单性方面被认为是合适的。