Pat-DEVAL: Chain-of-Legal-Thought Evaluation for Patent Description

arXiv:2601.00166v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Patent descriptions must deliver comprehensive technical disclosure while meeting strict legal standards such as enablement and written description requirements. Although large language models have enabled end-to-end automated patent drafting, existing evaluation approaches fail to assess long-form structural coherence and statutory compliance specific to descriptions. We propose Pat-DEVAL, the first multi-dimensional evaluation framework dedicated to patent description bodies. Leveraging the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm, Pat-DEVAL introduces Chain-of-Legal-Thought (CoLT), a legally-constrained reasoning mechanism that enforces sequential patent-law-specific analysis. Experiments validated by patent expert on our Pap2Pat-EvalGold dataset demonstrate that Pat-DEVAL achieves a Pearson correlation of 0.69, significantly outperforming baseline metrics and existing LLM evaluators. Notably, the framework exhibits a superior correlation of 0.73 in Legal-Professional Compliance, proving that the explicit injection of statutory constraints is essential for capturing nuanced legal validity. By establishing a new standard for ensuring both technical soundness and legal compliance, Pat-DEVAL provides a robust methodological foundation for the practical deployment of automated patent drafting systems.