We present methods for the automatic classification of patent applications using an annotated dataset provided by the organizers of the ALTA 2018 shared task - Classifying Patent Applications. The goal of the task is to use computational methods to categorize patent applications according to a coarse-grained taxonomy of eight classes based on the International Patent Classification (IPC). We tested a variety of approaches for this task and the best results, 0.778 micro-averaged F1-Score, were achieved by SVM ensembles using a combination of words and characters as features. Our team, BMZ, was ranked first among 14 teams in the competition.
 In this paper, we give an overview of the Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) competition at Chinese AI and Law challenge (CAIL2018). This competition focuses on LJP which aims to predict the judgment results according to the given facts. Specifically, in CAIL2018 , we proposed three subtasks of LJP for the contestants, i.e., predicting relevant law articles, charges and prison terms given the fact descriptions. CAIL2018 has attracted several hundreds participants (601 teams, 1, 144 contestants from 269 organizations). In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of the task definition, related works, outstanding methods and competition results in CAIL2018. Text categorization is the classification to assign a text document to an appropriate category in a predefined set of categories. We focus on the special case when categories are organized in hierarchy. We present a new approach on this recently emerged subfield of text categorization. The algorithm applies an iterative learning module that allow of gradually creating a classifier by trial-and-error-like method. We present a software that has been developed on the basis of the algorithm to illustrate the capability of the algorithm on large data collection. We experimented on the very large benchmark collection, on the WIPO-alpha (World Intellectual Property Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 2002) English patent database that consists of about 75000 XML documents distributed over 5000 categories. Our software is able to index the corpus quickly and creates a classifier in a few iteration cycles. We present the results achieved by the classifier w.r.t. various test setting