Applying Information Extraction for Patent Structure Analysis

Abstract

Patent engineers are spending significant time analyzing patent claim structures to grasp the range of technology covered or to compare similar patents in the same patent family. Though patent claims are the most important section in a patent, it is hard for a human to examine them. In this paper, we propose an information-extraction-based technique to grasp the patent claim structure. We confirmed that our approach is promising through empirical evaluation of entity mention extraction and the relation extraction method. We also built a preliminary interface to visualize patent structures, compare patents, and search similar patents.