Patent search using IPC classification vectors

Abstract

Finding similar patents is a challenging task in patent information retrieval. A patent application is often a starting point to find similar inventions. Keyword search for similar patents requires significant domain expertise and may not fetch relevant results. We propose a novel representation for patents and use a two stage approach to find similar patents. Each patent is represented as an IPC class vector. Citation network of patents is used to propagate these vectors from a node (patent) to its neighbors (cited patents). Thus, each patent is represented as a weighted combination of its IPC information as well as of its neighbors. A query patent is represented as a vector using its IPC information and similar patents can be simply found by comparing this vector with vectors of patents in the corpus. Text based search is used to re-rank this solution set to improve precision. We experiment with two similarity measures and re-ranking strategies to empirically show that our representation is effective in improving both precision and recall of queries of CLEF-2011 dataset.

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