ClaimMaster lets you to customize antecedent parsing rules when performing antecedent basis checking as part of patent proofreading. This adjustment may be needed, as ClaimMaster might occasionally make a mistake when grouping terms, which could result in falsely reported or unreported missing antecedents. Usually this happens because of the ambiguous claim language. For example, when encountering a phrase “packet receiving device driver,” ClaimMaster might break up this phrase into two separate sections: “packet” and “device driver,” even though you likely intended the whole phrase to be a single reference term. To remedy these types of issues, you can force the software to parse terms according to your preferences using a few simple parsing rules.
To modify Antecedent Basis parsing rules, follow these steps:
- Open Antecedent Basis Settings
Click on the Preferences, then Configure AB Checking Settings:
You can also access the same settings directly from the Antecedent Basis dialog by clicking on the Settings button.
- Specify Your Settings
Once the rules dialog opens, you can specify the following AB parsing rules:
1. Grouping terms together – if ClaimMaster prematurely stops parsing before the end of the entire intended phrase (e.g., parsing “packet” and “device driver” instead of “packet receiving device driver”), simply list the entire desired term and the software will not break it up. Note that certain words, such as “the” or “said” will still cause the parser to break up longer expressions into smaller groups if such expressions are encountered in the middle of the full expression.
2. Dropping a term from the end of the phrase – if ClaimMaster is being overly aggressive when joining terms together (e.g., “server system controls” instead of “server system”), then specify the point where the phrase should stop with the “//” sign. For example, when you specify “server system // controls”, ClaimMaster will group “server system,” but not “controls.”
3. Always ignoring the term – you can also exclude any last word(s) in multi-word phrases by marking off the word with “//”. You can exclude entire phrases from being parsed by using the same technique.
- Save Settings
Click on Save Settings button to save your AB parsing preferences.
For more information on this feature, check out the Online Manual.