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A Survey of Automated Hierarchical Classification of Patents

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Book cover Professional Search in the Modern World

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8830))

Abstract

In this era of “big data”, hundreds or even thousands of patent applications arrive every day to patent offices around the world. One of the first tasks of the professional analysts in patent offices is to assign classification codes to those patents based on their content. Such classification codes are usually organized in hierarchical structures of concepts. Traditionally the classification task has been done manually by professional experts. However, given the large amount of documents, the patent professionals are becoming overwhelmed. If we add that the hierarchical structures of classification are very complex (containing thousands of categories), reliable, fast and scalable methods and algorithms are needed to help the experts in patent classification tasks. This chapter describes, analyzes and reviews systems that, based on the textual content of patents, automatically classify such patents into a hierarchy of categories. This chapter focuses specially in the patent classification task applied for the International Patent Classification (IPC) hierarchy. The IPC is the most used classification structure to organize patents, it is world-wide recognized, and several other structures use or are based on it to ensure office inter-operability.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, 3001, Heverlee, Belgium

    Juan Carlos Gomez & Marie-Francine Moens

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  1. Juan Carlos Gomez
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  2. Marie-Francine Moens
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  1. School of Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wulfruna Street, WV1 1LY, Wolverhampton, UK

    Georgios Paltoglou

  2. Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus

    Fernando Loizides

  3. Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Isafjordsgatan 22, SE-164 28, Kista, Sweden

    Preben Hansen

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Gomez, J.C., Moens, MF. (2014). A Survey of Automated Hierarchical Classification of Patents. In: Paltoglou, G., Loizides, F., Hansen, P. (eds) Professional Search in the Modern World. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8830. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12511-4_11

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