Open Access

Subhash Pujari, Jannik Strötgen, Mark Giereth, Michael Gertz, Annemarie Friedrich

• Patent Landscaping, one of the central tasks of intellectual property management, includes selecting and grouping patents according to user-defined technical or application-oriented criteria. While recent transformer-based models have been shown to be effective for classifying patents into taxonomies such as CPC or IPC, there is yet little research on how to support real-world Patent Landscape Studies (PLSs) using natural language processing methods. With this paper, we release three labeled datasets for PLS-oriented classification tasks covering two diverse domains. We provide a qualitative analysis and report detailed corpus statistics.Most research on neural models for patents has been restricted to leveraging titles and abstracts. We compare strong neural and non-neural baselines, proposing a novel model that takes into account textual information from the patents’ full texts as well as embeddings created based on the patents’ CPC labels. We find that for PLS-orientedPatent Landscaping, one of the central tasks of intellectual property management, includes selecting and grouping patents according to user-defined technical or application-oriented criteria. While recent transformer-based models have been shown to be effective for classifying patents into taxonomies such as CPC or IPC, there is yet little research on how to support real-world Patent Landscape Studies (PLSs) using natural language processing methods. With this paper, we release three labeled datasets for PLS-oriented classification tasks covering two diverse domains. We provide a qualitative analysis and report detailed corpus statistics.Most research on neural models for patents has been restricted to leveraging titles and abstracts. We compare strong neural and non-neural baselines, proposing a novel model that takes into account textual information from the patents’ full texts as well as embeddings created based on the patents’ CPC labels. We find that for PLS-oriented classification tasks, going beyond title and abstract is crucial, CPC labels are an effective source of information, and combining all features yields the best results.…