The mean transduction in the sense of sequence-to-sequence models (transducing one sequence to another).

Attention based models don't necessarily need to be sequence to sequence. They can be classifiers, decoder only, etc. Attention is just one tool in the ML architecture toolkit.

Patent lingo is necessarily more generic than the lingo used within the machine learning space. For example, within patents, they will talk about using computers to do things, which is obvious outside of the patent world. But when writing a patent, you have to actually mention that you're going to use a computer to implement a neural network.