A User-Friendly Patent Search Paradigm

As an important operation for finding existing relevant patents and validating a new patent application, patent search has attracted considerable attention recently. However, many users have limited knowledge about the underlying patents, and they have to use a try-and-see approach to repeatedly issue different queries and check answers, which is a very tedious process. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a new user-friendly patent search paradigm, which can help users find relevant patents more easily and improve user search experience. We propose three effective techniques, error correction, topic-based query suggestion, and query expansion, to improve the usability of patent search. We also study how to efficiently find relevant answers from a large collection of patents. We first partition patents into small partitions based to their topics and classes. Then, given a query, we find highly relevant partitions and answer the query in each of such highly relevant partitions. Finally, we combine the answers of each partition and generate top-k answers of the patent-search query.