Construction and Application of Patent Technical Element Dependency Network

Abstract

For the past decade, technologies in nearly all fields have been evolving rapidly, which brings explosive growth in the number of granted patents. How to exploit the technological information contained in patent data efficiently is relevant and meaningful for managing technologies, making policies, and assisting innovations. Therefore, in this article, we propose the concept of patent technical element dependency network (PTEDN) based on patent claims. First, the PTEDN of a domain is built on the patent claim texts and the internal syntactic dependencies. Second, the innovation points and potential innovative perspectives in different periods can be uncovered through the PTEDNs of a domain in consecutive time intervals. Third, a heuristic method is raised to assist innovators in refining their ideas continuously on the basis of a PTEDN. Finally, this framework is employed in surgical robot domain to reveal some significant rules and potential research points. The main contributions of this article are summarized as follows. First, the PTEDNs are built based on patent claim texts without removing any words, e.g., adjectives and adverbs, which reserve the technical information in them as much as possible. Second, based on a PTEDN, a heuristic method is designed to inspire innovators through the related information of the research objects other than the similar technological information provided by common methods.