Patent prior art search using deep learning language model

Abstract

A patent is one of the essential indicators of new technologies and business processes, which becomes the main driving force of the companies and even the national competitiveness as well, that has recently been submitted and exploited in a large scale of quantities of information sources. Since the number of patent processing personnel, however, can hardly keep up with the increasing number of patents, and thus may have been worried about from deteriorating the quality of examinations. In this regard, the advancement of deep learning for the language processing capabilities has been developed significantly so that the prior art search by the deep learning models also can be accomplished for the labor-intensive and expensive patent document search tasks. The prior art search requires differentiation tasks, usually with the sheer volume of relevant documents; thus, the recall is much more important than the precision, which is the primary difference from the conventional search engines. This paper addressed a method to effectively handle the patent documents using BERT, one of the major deep learning-based language models. We proved through experiments that our model had outperformed the conventional approaches and the combinations of the key components with the recall value of up to '94.29%' from the real patent dataset.