science

MAREC

MAREC is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand MAREC rather than just read about it. In short: The MAtrixware REsearch Collection (MAREC) is a standardised patent data corpus available for research purposes. MAREC seeks to represent patent documents of several languages in order to answer specific research questions.

Key takeaways

MAREC belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect MAREC to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of MAREC from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The MAtrixware REsearch Collection (MAREC) is a standardised patent data corpus available for research purposes. MAREC seeks to represent patent documents of several languages in order to answer specific research questions. It consists of 19 million patent documents in different languages, normalised to a highly specific XML schema. MAREC is intended as raw material for research in areas such as information retrieval, natural language processing or machine translation, which require large amounts of complex documents. The collection contains documents in 19 languages, the majority being English, German and French, and about half of the documents include full text. In MAREC, the documents from different countries and sources are normalised to a common XML format with a uniform patent numbering scheme and citation format. The standardised fields include dates, countries, languages, references, person names, and companies as well as subject classifications such as IPC codes. MAREC is a comparable corpus, where many documents are available in similar versions in other languages. A comparable corpus can be defined as consisting of texts that share similar topics – news text from the same time period in different countries, while a parallel corpus is defined as a collection of documents with aligned translations from the source to the target language. Since the patent document refers to the same “invention” or “concept of idea” the text is a translation of the invention, but it does not have to be a direct translation of the text itself – text parts could have been removed or added for clarification reasons. The 19,386,697 XML files measure a total of 621 GB and are hosted by the Information Retrieval Facility. Access and support are free of charge for research purposes.

Use Cases MAREC is used in the Patent Language Translations Online (PLuTO) project.

References

External links User guide and statistics Information Retrieval Facility Archived 2008-05-22 at the Wayback Machine

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with MAREC

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what MAREC claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to MAREC before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about MAREC ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of MAREC

In research: MAREC appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses MAREC in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: MAREC is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Corpora, Information retrieval systems, Machine translation, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for MAREC outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study MAREC in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what MAREC means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain MAREC out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is MAREC in simple terms?

Why does MAREC matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study MAREC?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on MAREC.