DS²PT: A Deep Two-Stage Patent Text Segmentation Framework Informed by Low-Latency Neural Network Characteristics

Patent text segmentation is a fundamental task in patent data mining, enabling applications such as patent analysis and search. The objective is to decompose structurally complex, lengthy sentences into grammatically complete, semantically equivalent short sentences to facilitate downstream processing. Traditional approaches rely on manually defined rules or feature-based machine learning methods, which are labor-intensive, domain-specific, and exhibit limited generalizability. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a Deep Segmentation Model for Patent Text (DS²PT), a two-stage fine-grained segmentation framework based on ALBERT. The first stage employs a conditional random field model to perform coarse segmentation of patent paragraphs into shorter clauses based on structural cues. The second stage utilizes the ALBERT model to perform deep, context-aware segmentation of complex clauses into syntactically independent and semantically complete sentences. Compared to conventional methods, DS²PT effectively captures hierarchical contextual information across two stages, significantly improving segmentation accuracy without semantic loss. Furthermore, this research draws inspiration from advancements in cross-lingual speech-to-text systems with low-latency neural networks for real-time applications. While the domains differ, the core technical challenges are analogous: both require models to process sequential, information-dense input (audio streams or long sentences) into structured, meaningful units (transcribed text or segmented clauses) with high accuracy and efficiency. The principles of low-latency neural networks-such as efficient context modeling, parallelizable architectures, and real-time incremental processing-inform the design of our segmentation pipeline to enhance its scalability and potential for integration into real-time patent analysis systems. Similarly, the cross-lingual capability highlights the importance of model generalization, which aligns with our goal of developing a domain-adaptive segmentation tool for diverse patent corpora.