Development of a patent document classification and search platform using a back-propagation network

In order to process large numbers of explicit knowledge documents such as patents in an organized manner, automatic document categorization and search are required. In this paper, we develop a document classification and search methodology based on neural network technology that helps companies manage patent documents more effectively. The classification process begins by extracting key phrases from the document set by means of automatic text processing and determining the significance of key phrases according to their frequency in text. In order to maintain a manageable number of independent key phrases, correlation analysis is applied to compute the similarities between key phrases. Phrases with higher correlations are synthesized into a smaller set of phrases. Finally, the back-propagation network model is adopted as a classifier. The target output identifies a patent document’s category based on a hierarchical classification scheme, in this case, the international patent classification (IPC) standard. The methodology is tested using patents related to the design of power hand-tools. Related patents are automatically classified using pre-trained neural network models. In the prototype system, two modules are used for patent document management. The automatic classification module helps the user classify patent documents and the search module helps users find relevant and related patent documents. The result shows an improvement in document classification and identification over previously published methods of patent document management.     

Product functional information based automatic patent classification: Method and experimental studies

In order to effectively extract the hidden information from the patent texts and to further provide this information to support the product innovation design process, this paper proposed an automatic patent classification method based on the functional basis and Naive Bayes theory. The functions of products are regarded as the innovation attributes, and the function co-reference relations of the patents in different areas are established. Patent classification methods are proposed based on the functions of products and the general steps of the patent classification process are proposed. In addition, three training methods are studied in the experiments, including multi-classification fully supervised training, multiple dichotomous supervised training and semi-supervised training. Through comparing and analyzing the experimental results, a patent text classifier is developed. In summary, this paper provides a general idea and the relevant technologies on how to build a patent knowledge space by automatically extracting and expanding the patent texts.     

Identification of trends from patents using self-organizing maps

Patent users such as governments, inventors, and manufacturing organizations strive to identify the directions in which new technology is advancing, and their goal is to outline the boundaries of existing knowledge. The paper analyzes patent knowledge to identify research trends. A model based on knowledge extraction from patents and self-organizing maps for knowledge representation is presented. The model was tested on patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The experiments show that the method provides both an overview of the directions of the trends and a drill-down perspective of current trends.     

Exploiting Wikipedia and EuroWordNet to solve Cross-Lingual Question Answering

This paper describes a new advance in solving Cross-Lingual Question Answering (CL-QA) tasks. It is built on three main pillars: (i) the use of several multilingual knowledge resources to reference words between languages (the Inter Lingual Index (ILI) module of EuroWordNet and the multilingual knowledge encoded in Wikipedia); (ii) the consideration of more than only one translation per word in order to search candidate answers; and (iii) the analysis of the question in the original language without any translation process. This novel approach overcomes the errors caused by the common use of Machine Translation (MT) services by CL-QA systems. We also expose some studies and experiments that justify the importance of analyzing whether a Named Entity should be translated or not. Experimental results in bilingual scenarios show that our approach performs better than an MT based CL-QA approach achieving an average improvement of 36.7%.     

Establish a patent risk prediction model for emerging technologies using deep learning and data augmentation

Technology patents are considered the source and bedrock of emerging technologies. Patents create value in any enterprise. However, obtaining patents is time consuming, expensive, and risky; especially if the patent application is rejected. The development of new patents requires extensive costs and resources, but sometimes they may be similar to other patents once the technology is fully developed. They might lack relevant patentable features and as a result, fail to pass the patent examination, resulting in investment losses. Patent infringement is also an especially important topic for reducing the risk of legal damages of patent holders, applicants, and manufacturers. Patent examinations have so far been performed manually. Due to manpower and time limitations, the examination time is exceedingly long and inefficient. Current patent similarity comparison research, and the classification algorithms of text mining are most commonly employed to provide analyses of the possibility of examination approval, but there is insufficient discussion about the possibility of infringement. However, if a new technology or innovation can be accurately determined in advance whether it likely to pass or fail (and why), or is at risk of patent infringement, losses can be mitigated.This research attempts to identify the issues involved in evaluating patent applications and infringement risks from existing patent databases. For each patent application, this research uses Convolutional Neural Networks, CNN + Long Short Term Memory Network, LSTM, prediction model, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) public utility patent application and reviews results based on keyword search. Then, data augmentation is utilized before performing model training; 10% of the approved and rejected applications are randomly selected as test cases, with the remaining 90% of the cases used to train the prediction model of this research in order to determine a model that can predict patent infringement and examination outcomes. Experimental results of the model in this study predicts that the accuracy of each classification is at least 87.7%, and can be used to find the classification of the reason for a rejection of a patent application failure.     

A Semantic-based Intellectual Property Management System (SIPMS) for supporting patent analysis

Patent databases provide valuable information for technology management. However, the rapid growth of patent documents, the lengthy text and the rich of content in technical terminology, and the complicated relationships among the patents, make it taking a lot of human effort for conducting analyses. As a result, an automated system for assisting the inventors in patent analysis as well as providing support in technological innovation is in great demand. In this paper, a Semantic-based Intellectual Property Management System (SIPMS) has been developed for supporting the management of intellectual properties (IP). It incorporates semantic analysis and text mining techniques for processing and analyzing the patent documents. The method differentiates itself from the traditional technological management tools in its knowledge base. Instead of eliciting knowledge from domain experts, the proposed method adopts global patent databases as sources of knowledge. The system enables users to search for existing patent documents or relevant IP documents which are related to a potential new invention and to support invention by providing the relationships and patterns among a group of IP documents. The method has been evaluated by benchmarking with the performance against traditional text mining technique and has successfully been implemented at a selected reference site.     

Patent value analysis using support vector machines

Receiving patents or licenses is an inevitable act of research in order to protect new ideas leading innovation. Request for patents has increased exponentially in order to legalize the intellectual property. Measuring economical value of each patent has been widely studied in the literature. Majority of the research in this field is focused on the patent driver prospect handled for the patent offices. There are a variety of criteria affecting decisions on each patent right; and predicting the possibility of grant may help the researchers to take some precautions. Objective of this study is to propose a robust model to determine if the appeal has a chance of approval. A case study is run on the patents that are accepted and rejected in home appliance industry to construct an intelligent classification model. The support vector machine, Back-Propagation Network and Bayes classification methods are compared on the proposed model. The proposed model in this study will help the decision makers to predict whether the patent appeal will be accepted. The study is unique with the approach that helps the candidate patent owners.     

Automated patent landscaping

Patent landscaping is the process of finding patents related to a particular topic. It is important for companies, investors, governments, and academics seeking to gauge innovation and assess risk. However, there is no broadly recognized best approach to landscaping. Frequently, patent landscaping is a bespoke human-driven process that relies heavily on complex queries over bibliographic patent databases. In this paper, we present Automated Patent Landscaping, an approach that jointly leverages human domain expertise, heuristics based on patent metadata, and machine learning to generate high-quality patent landscapes with minimal effort. In particular, this paper describes a flexible automated methodology to construct a patent landscape for a topic based on an initial seed set of patents. This approach takes human-selected seed patents that are representative of a topic, such as operating systems, and uses structure inherent in patent data such as references and class codes to “expand” the seed set to a set of “probably-related” patents and anti-seed “probably-unrelated” patents. The expanded set of patents is then pruned with a semi-supervised machine learning model trained on seed and anti-seed patents. This removes patents from the expanded set that are unrelated to the topic and ensures a comprehensive and accurate landscape.     

A patent quality analysis for innovative technology and product development

Enterprises evaluate intellectual property rights and the quality of patent documents in order to develop innovative products and discover state-of-the-art technology trends. The product technologies covered by patent claims are protected by law, and the quality of the patent insures against infringement by competitors while increasing the worth of the invention. Thus, patent quality analysis provides a means by which companies determine whether or not to customize and manufacture innovative products. Since patents provide significant financial protection for businesses, the number of patents filed is increasing at a fast pace. Companies which cannot process patent information or fail to protect their innovations by filing patents lose market competitiveness. Current patent research is needed to estimate the quality of patent documents. The purpose of this research is to improve the analysis and ranking of patent quality. The first step of the proposed methodology is to collect technology specific patents and to extract relevant patent quality performance indicators. The second step is to identify the key impact factors using principal component analysis. These factors are then used as the input parameters for a back-propagation neural network model. Patent transactions help judge patent quality and patents which are licensed or sold with intellectual property usage rights are considered high quality patents. This research collected 283 patents sold or licensed from the news of patent transactions and 116 patents which were unsold but belong to the technology specific domains of interest. After training the patent quality model, 36 historical patents are used to verify the performance of the trained model. The match between the analytical results and the actual trading status reached an 85% level of accuracy. Thus, the proposed patent quality methodology evaluates the quality of patents automatically and effectively as a preliminary screening solution. The approach saves domain experts valuable time targeting high value patents for R&D commercialization and mass customization of products.     

基于深度学习的专利知识推荐服务研究

专利作为一种包含大多数领域中最完整的设计信息,可以为设计者解决设计问题提供有价值的指导。针对现有的专利推荐方法难以有效地推荐跨领域专利的问题,提出一种基于深度学习的跨领域专利知识推荐方法,用于创新产品的概念设计。对产品功能和知识需求情境进行建模,将设计问题进行标准化表达,生成设计问题空间。提出一种半监督学习算法（TG-TCI）将专利功能信息按照功能基自动分类和标记,利用实体识别算法（BERT-BiLSTM-CRF）提取专利应用场景术语、技术术语,结合国际专利分类（IPC）信息以表示专利的功能、情境、技术和领域属性,从而生成专利知识空间。通过设计问题空间到专利知识空间的功能基和知识情境映射查找所需的跨领域专利,根据技术和领域属性对它们进行聚类和评估,选出特定的专利以激发设计者的创造力。以一个实际案例进行分析验证,证明了基于深度学习的专利知识推荐模型的可行性及有效性。     

Intelligent patent recommendation system for innovative design collaboration

Patents' search is increasingly critical for a company's technological advancement and sustainable marketing strategy. When most innovative designs are created collaboratively by a diverse team of researchers and technologists, patent knowledge management becomes time consuming with repeated efforts creating additional task conflicts. This research develops an intelligent recommendation methodology and system to enable timely and effective patent search prior, during, and after design collaboration to prevent potential infringement of existing intellectual property rights (IPR) and to secure new IPR for market advantage. The research develops an algorithm to dynamically search related patents in global patent databases. The system clusters users with similar patent search behaviors and, subsequently, infers new patent recommendations based on inter-cluster group member behaviors and characteristics. First, the methodology evaluates the filtered information obtained from collaborative patent searches. Second, the system clusters existing users and identifies users' neighbors based on the collaborative filtering algorithm. Using the clusters of users and their behaviors, the system recommends related patents. When collaborative design teams are planning R&D policies or searching patents and prior art claims to create new IP and prevent or settles IP legal disputes, the intelligent recommendation system identifies and recommends patents with greater efficiency and accuracy than previous systems and methods described in the literature.     

Intelligent compilation of patent summaries using machine learning and natural language processing techniques

Patents are a type of intellectual property with ownership and monopolistic rights that are publicly accessible published documents, often with illustrations, registered by governments and international organizations. The registration allows people familiar with the domain to understand how to re-create the new and useful invention but restricts the manufacturing unless the owner licenses or enters into a legal agreement to sell ownership of the patent. Patents reward the costly research and development efforts of inventors while spreading new knowledge and accelerating innovation. This research uses artificial intelligence natural language processing, deep learning techniques and machine learning algorithms to extract the essential knowledge of patent documents within a given domain as a means to evaluate their worth and technical advantage. Manual patent abstraction is a time consuming, labor intensive, and subjective process which becomes cost and outcome ineffective as the size of the patent knowledge domain increases. This research develops an intelligent patent summarization methodology using artificial intelligence machine learning approaches to allow patent domains of extremely large sizes to be effectively and objectively summarized, especially for cases where the cost and time requirements of manual summarization is infeasible. The system learns to automatically summarize patent documents with natural language texts for any given technical domain. The machine learning solution identifies technical key terminologies (words, phrases, and sentences) in the context of the semantic relationships among training patents and corresponding summaries as the core of the summarization system. To ensure the high performance of the proposed methodology, ROUGE metrics are used to evaluate precision, recall, accuracy, and consistency of knowledge generated by the summarization system. The Smart machinery technologies domain, under the sub-domains of control intelligence, sensor intelligence and intelligent decision-making provide the case studies for the patent summarization system training. The cases use 1708 training pairs of patents and summaries while testing uses 30 randomly selected patents. The case implementation and verification have shown the summary reports achieve 90% and 84% average precision and recall ratios respectively.     

面向审查任务的中文专利检索模型与实验*

针对中国国家知识产权局专利审查中的专利检索任务,设计了一个两步专利检索模型:第一步进行布尔初步检索;第二步采用向量空间模型进行相似性计算,从而得到排序的二次检索结果。实验数据来源于中国国家知识产权局,结果显示该检索模型是有效的,部分地克服了现有检索方法的不足,大大减轻了审查员的工作负担,提高了工作效率。     

A simulative approach to determining the economic efficiency of software patents

Traditionally, only technical inventions such as light bulbs or pharmaceuticals were protected by patents. Nowadays software patents are a widely discussed topic in the U.S. and in Europe because of their supposed impact on national innovation rates. Based on an analysis of the determinants of successful software development, we use a bipartite probability model to compare a deregulated market without patents to a market using a patent system. Applying computer-based simulations, we analyze different scenarios to test the impact of different patent duration and width on the innovation behavior of the software market. We show that strong patent protection is globally efficient only in markets with a relatively low profit potential.     

Information retrieval and knowledge discovery utilizing a biomedical patent semantic Web

Before undertaking new biomedical research, identifying concepts that have already been patented is essential. A traditional keyword-based search on patent databases may not be sufficient to retrieve all the relevant information, especially for the biomedical domain. This paper presents BioPatentMiner, a system that facilitates information retrieval and knowledge discovery from biomedical patents. The system first identifies biological terms and relations from the patents and then integrates the information from the patents with knowledge from biomedical ontologies to create a semantic Web. Besides keyword search and queries linking the properties specified by one or more RDF triples, the system can discover semantic associations between the Web resources. The system also determines the importance of the resources to rank the results of a search and prevent information overload while determining the semantic associations.     

基于注意力迁移的跨语言关系抽取方法

针对互联网上日渐丰富的多语言文本和匮乏大规模标注平行语料库的问题,为了从多语言的信息源挖掘语言间的关联性与扩展知识图谱,提出了基于注意力迁移的跨语言关系提取方法。首先针对语言间的实际平行语料情况,分类进行跨语言平行语料映射,并针对缺乏种子词典的低资源语言对,提出神经网络翻译模型获取目标语言数据集并保存多语言间的对应注意力权重关系,然后利用BERT端对端的联合抽取模型抽取训练数据实体关系特征,反向迁移语言间注意力权重关系,最后利用反向迁移的注意力进行增强的关系抽取。实验表明,该模型的关系提取效果相比其他模型在准确率和回归上都有所提升,在缺乏双语词典情况下也表现出较好的性能。     

Patent classification system using a new hybrid genetic algorithm support vector machine

Nowadays, decision-making activities of knowledge-intensive enterprises depend heavily on the successful classification of patents. A considerable amount of time is required to achieve successful classification because of the complexity associated with patent information and of the large number of potential patents. Several different patent classification approaches have been developed in the past, but most of these studies focus on using computational models for the International Patent Classification (IPC) system rather than using these models in real-world cases of patent classification. In contrast to previous studies that combined algorithms and the IPC system directly without using expert screening, this study proposes a novel artificial intelligence (AI)-aided patent decision-making process. In this process, an expert screening approach is integrated with a hybrid genetic-based support vector machine (HGA-SVM) model for developing a patent classification system with the high classification accuracy and generalization ability for real-world patent searching cases. The proposed approach is tested on a real-world case—an expert's patent document searching history that contains 234 patent documents of semiconductor equipment components. The research results demonstrate that our proposed hybrid genetic algorithm approach can optimize all the parameters of the SVM for developing a patent classification system with a high accuracy. The proposed HGA-SVM model is able to dynamically and automatically classify patent documents by recording and learning the experts’ knowledge and logic. Finally, we propose a new decision-making process for improving the development of the SVM patent classification and searching system.     

基于权利要求结构信息的中文专利无效检索模型*

中文专利独立权利要求分为前序部分和特征部分。文中构建的专利无效检索模型,充分考虑了这一信息,从专利数据库中统计出40个分割词对独立权利要求进行分割处理。具体检索中采用两步检索：第一步进行布尔检索以提高召回率;第二步对申请专利与第一步返回专利独立权利要求的前序部分和特征部分分别进行相似度计算,适当组合后作为整体的相似度。实验中对分割前后以及分割后不同的词语权重选择方法对检索效果的影响作了比较,结果显示该模型是非常有效的。     

Analyzing a firm’s international portfolio of technological knowledge: A declarative ontology-based OWL approach for patent documents

Patent databases contain large amounts of information about the inventions and metadata of corporate patents (such as the technological domain they belong to, their applicants, and inventors). These databases are available online but since they do not provide explicit information about the relationships between different patent metadata, it is not possible for computers to automatically process such relationships. Several patent ontologies have been proposed so far in order to provide patent knowledge bases with semantics by merging information from different databases and establishing a common vocabulary. However, previous ontology literature has paid limited attention to the representation of specific relationships among metadata and the design of reasoning procedures that would allow some information not explicitly specified in the databases or ontologies to be inferred. This article proposes a methodological approach for the definition of relationships and reasoning tasks for patent analysis by using patent ontologies, and provides a real illustration of its potential in the context of international flows of research knowledge. This declarative method is based on the formal definition of key patent analysis indicators (KPAIs). The case study analysis is relevant because global competition and the importance of multinational firms in the patent process have resulted in firms not only patenting on their domestic markets but also transferring their patents to other markets and developing patents in different countries. In this context, it is important to analyze the connections between the patenting processes and the international knowledge flows of research and development. More specifically, the paper illustrates the applicability of the proposed methodology by classifying patents into the five patterns of internationalization identified by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).     

基于核心概念集的多语言Ontology

随着Web资源的日益丰富,人们需要跨语言的知识共享和信息检索。一个多语言Ontology可以用来刻画不同语言相关领域的知识,克服不同文化和不同语言带来的障碍。对现有的构建多语言Ontology方法进行分析和比较,提出一种基于核心概念集的多语言Ontology的构建方法,用一个独立于特定语言的Ontology以及来自不同自然语言的定义和词汇的同义词集来描述相关领域的概念。用该方法构建的Ontology具有良好的扩展能力、表达能力和推理能力,特别适合分布式环境下大型Ontology的创建。