Specifying custom antecedent parsing rules


ClaimMaster lets you to customize antecedent parsing rules. This may be needed, as ClaimMaster might occasionally make a mistake when grouping terms, which may 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.



Getting Started

  • You can access AB settings directly from the antecedent basis dialog by clicking on the "Settings" button.
  • In addition, you can also access the custom settings from the "Preferences" menu.


Feature Options

Once you select the feature above,  "Antecedent Checking Preferences" menu will open with the following options:




The following parsing/grouping rules can be used in this section.  Note:  do not include articles or quotation marks in your term definitions. Each term should start on a new line. 


    1. Specifies whether to use strict AB checking - i.e., each subsequent antecedent reference must appear in the same form as the original reference and shorthand is not allowed. May result in more false positives.
    2. If this checkbox is enabled (by default), ClaimMaster will break up longer noun phrases when it encounters the proposition "of".  For example, "server module of second network" will be broken up into "server module" and "second network".  If you want to keep ClaimMaster grouping the terms together even when the first part of the noun phrase is modified with "of" by the second phrase, unselect this checkbox.  Doing so may result in more terms identified as lacking antecedent basis if you are not re-using the identical form of the phrase ("i.e., the server module of second network") throughout your claims.
    3. Press this button to add the currently selected text in the document to the list.
    4. Specifies global AB parsing preferences.
      • If ClaimMaster prematurely stops parsing before the end of the entire intended phrase (e.g., parsing "packet" and “module” instead of "packet processing module"), 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.
      • If ClaimMaster is being overly aggressive when joining terms together (e.g., "device driver exhibits" instead of "device driver"), then specify the point where the phrase should stop with the "//" sign. For example, when you specify "device driver // exhibits", ClaimMaster will group "device driver," but not "exhibits." 
      • 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.
      • You can specify settings on the global level and on the document level.  Document-level antecedent parsing preferences will only apply to the currently open document (based on its name), while global settings will apply to all documents.
    1. Specifies document-specific AB parsing preferences.  Note that these preferences will be saved with the document itself.  Use the same syntax as for the global preferences.
    2. Once you make changes to the table, make sure to click "Save." Your definitions are kept in the "antecedent_settings.txt" file in the ClaimMaster's Settings directory.