Extraction of the effect and the technology terms from a patent document

A patent map, a visual representation of related patent information, is an effective strategic tool for analysis of patent application trends. In particular, an effect-technology type patent map is commonly used as patent examinations are based on technology and effect terms of the inventions. However, conventional patent mining tools are not realized to make an effect-technology type patent map. In order to generate effect-technology type patent maps automatically, we propose a method for extracting information on the effect and the technological terms from patent documents. Our proposed method is described by the following steps. (Step 1) Extract expressions containing the information on the technical effect by using frequent expressions and clue expressions that are automatically extracted by using statistical information and initial clue expressions. (Step 2) Extract technology terms in the above expressions by character-string comparison between patent claims and the expressions. (Step 3) Extract effect terms using grammar patterns that are composed of technology terms, frequent expressions and clue expressions. Our method achieves high precision (85.0%) by using frequent expressions, clue expressions, and the grammar patterns.