Leith on E-participation and E-participants: Solving the Patent ‘Crisis’

Professor Dr. Philip Leith of Queen’s University Belfast School of Law has published E-participation and e-participants: solving the patent ‘crisis’, International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 26, 7-24 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

One of the major planks of some visions for E-Gov is that there is a willing participatory group who are more than happy to be involved in new forms of democracy and will be active and useful suppliers of input to e-consultation or e-participation processes. This group is different from that which goes online to the government website and signs a petition asking the prime minister to resign. It is becoming clear, though, that the commitment to e-participation may well be there in theory, but difficult to access in practice. Further, the participation that is most welcome can frequently require training and expertise that is not widely available or there may be differences in opinion as to the point of participation. In this paper I will look to the attempts to encourage participation in the patent system. The UK has initiated a trial system utilising New York Law School’s Peer-To-Patent project, but has also attempted to involve participants in previous consultation exercises. I will use these as demonstrations of the sorts of problems that e-participation has met, and consider whether this new form of E-Gov is perhaps being oversold. The interesting question is whether participation is a growing tool that can ensure better public services from the State. My conclusion is that consultation and participatory projects can demonstrate involvement and are certainly educative, but e-participatory projects are most likely incapable of achieving the goals set by their more optimistic advocates. The paper emphasises the patents field, but the lessons from it can – I suggest – be viewed as indicators having wider governance relevance. The primary point being made is that the technocratic view is always over-optimistic.

Liu & Shih on Hybrid-Patent Classification Based on Patent-Network Analysis

Professor Dr. Duen-Ren Liu and Meng-Jung Shih, both of National Chiao Tung University Institute of Information Management, have published Hybrid-patent classification based on patent-network analysis, forthcoming in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). Here is the abstract:

Effective patent management is essential for organizations to maintain their competitive advantage. The classification of patents is a critical part of patent management and industrial analysis. This study proposes a hybrid-patent-classification approach that combines a novel patent-network-based classification method with three conventional classification methods to analyze query patents and predict their classes. The novel patent network contains various types of nodes that represent different features extracted from patent documents. The nodes are connected based on the relationship metrics derived from the patent metadata. The proposed classification method predicts a query patent’s class by analyzing all reachable nodes in the patent network and calculating their relevance to the query patent. It then classifies the query patent with a modified k-nearest neighbor classifier. To further improve the approach, we combine it with content-based, citation-based, and metadata-based classification methods to develop a hybrid-classification approach. We evaluate the performance of the hybrid approach on a test dataset of patent documents obtained from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and compare its performance with that of the three conventional methods. The results demonstrate that the proposed patent-network-based approach yields more accurate class predictions than the patent network-based approach.

Martínez on Patent Families: When Do Different Definitions Really Matter?

Dr. Catalina Martínez García of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Instituto de Políticas y Bienes Públicos has published Patent Families: When Do Different Definitions Really Matter?, Scientometrics, v. 86, no. 1 (2011), pp. 39-63. Here is the abstract:

Data on patent families is used in economic and statistical studies for many purposes, including the analysis of patenting strategies of applicants, the monitoring of the globalization of inventions and the comparison of the inventive performance and stock of technological knowledge of different countries. Most of these studies take family data as given, as a sort of black box, without going into the details of their underlying methodologies and patent linkages. However, different definitions of patent families may lead to different results. One of the purposes of this paper is to compare the most commonly used definitions of patent families and identify factors causing differences in family outcomes. Another objective is to shed light into the internal structure of patent families and see how it affects patent family outcomes based on different definitions. An automated characterization of the internal structures of all extended families with earliest priorities in the 1990s, as recorded in PATSTAT, found that family counts are not affected by the choice of patent family definitions in 75% of families. However, different definitions may really matter for the 25% of families with complex structures and lead to different family compositions, which might have an impact, for instance, on econometric studies using family size as a proxy of patent value.

Magdy & Jones on Examining the Robustness of Evaluation Metrics for Patent Retrieval with Incomplete Relevance Judgements

Walid Magdy and Dr. Gareth J. F. Jones, both of the Dublin City University School of Computing, will present a paper entitled Examining the Robustness of Evaluation Metrics for Patent Retrieval with Incomplete Relevance Judgements, at CLEF 2010: The Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation, to be held 20-23 September 2010 in Padua, Italy. Here is the abstract:

Recent years have seen a growing interest in research into patent retrieval. One of the key issues in conducting information retrieval (IR) research is meaningful evaluation of the effectiveness of the retrieval techniques applied to task under investigation. Unlike many existing well explored IR tasks where the focus is on achieving high retrieval precision, patent retrieval is to a significant degree a recall focused task. The standard evaluation metric used for patent retrieval evaluation tasks is currently mean average precision (MAP). However this does not reflect system recall well. Meanwhile, the alternative of using the standard recall measure does not reflect user search effort, which is a significant factor in practical patent search environments. In recent work we introduce a novel evaluation metric for patent retrieval evaluation (PRES) (Magdy and Jones, SIGIR 2010). This is designed to reflect both system recall and user effort. Analysis of PRES demonstrated its greater effectiveness in evaluating recall-oriented applications than standard MAP and Recall. One dimension of the evaluation of patent retrieval which has not previously been studied is the effect on reliability of the evaluation metrics when relevance judgements are incomplete. We provide a study comparing the behaviour of PRES against the standard MAP and Recall metrics for varying incomplete judgements in patent retrieval. Experiments carried out using runs from the CLEF-IP 2009 datasets show that PRES and Recall are more robust than MAP for incomplete relevance sets for this task with a small preference to PRES as the most robust evaluation metric for patent retrieval with respect to the completeness of the relevance set.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the authors.

Thanks to the authors for providing the abstract.

Wechsler on Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian Patent Information: Asia’s Rising Role in Technology Disclosure through the Patent System

Andrea Wechsler, LL.M., of Max-Planck-Institut für Geistiges Eigentum, Wettbewerbs- und Steuerrecht has published Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian Patent Information: Asia’s Rising Role in Technology Disclosure through the Patent System, 2 Tsinghua China Law Review, Issue No. 1, Fall 2009, pages 101-158.

Here is the abstract:

Patent information – as a form of technology disclosure – serves an important function in business strategy as well as in industrial policy making. This study first discusses the role of patent information for technology disclosure before showing the rising importance of patents in Asia (Japan, Korea, China, India) as source of technological information. It demonstrates both the substantial increase of Asian patents in force from the 1980s to 2006 and the increase of Asian patent grants from the 1990s to 2006. Furthermore, Asian patent grants for every billion U.S. Dollar of the gross domestic product (in current prices of the period measured) are analyzed as is the ratio of patent grants to patent applications in Japan, Korea, China, and India. Analyses of the availability of and access to patent information in Asia demonstrate that patent information is easily accessible, while its relevance is hard to detect. In consequence, this paper argues that the increasing relevance of Asian patent information needs to be complemented with the provision of competitive databases that contain value-added patent information allowing for high quality search results.

June 30 Webcast: e-Justice Track of SEPG Europe 2010

A free Webcast of the e-Justice Track of the SEPG Europe 2010 Conference, will be held 30 June 2010. The event will be Webcast from the University of Porto Faculty of Engineering in Porto, Portugal.

Here are the major presentations to be given during the event:

• Mr José Magalhães, Secretary of State of Justice and the Judiciary Modernization, The quality of software as a sustainability factor for the use of the information technologies within the justice system;
• The quality of software as a sustainability factor for the use of the information technologies within the justice system – the Portuguese experience;
• Mr Bruno Sá, Chairman of the Information Technologies Institute of the Ministry of Justice, The dematerialization of processes in the courts;
• Mr António Figueiredo, Chairman of the Registers and Notaries Institute, The interoperability and the innovating registers services;
• Mr. Pedro Santos, Management Director of Industrial Property National Institute, On-Line Trade Marks and Patents;
• Mr Domingos Farinho, Director of the Alternative Dispute Resolution Means Cabinet, On-Line Alternative Dispute Resolution Means;
• Mrs Zaida Chora, Deputy Chairman of the Information Technologies Institute of the Ministry of Justice, The Development of Information Systems within the Public Administration;
• Mr Ponciano Oliveira, Deputy Chairman of the Information Technologies Institute of the Ministry of Justice, The use of information technologies within the justice systems on the international context.

Thanks to Stéphane Cottin for this information.

Call for Papers: PaIR 2010: Workshop on Patent Information Retrieval

A call for papers — with submission deadline of 30 June 2010 — has been issued for PaIR 2010: The 3rd International Workshop on Patent Information Retrieval, to be held 26 October 2010, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The workshop is collocated with CIKM 2010: The 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.

According to the call, PaIR 2010 “solicits two types of papers: ‘research/solutions’ and ‘IP/needs’ papers.”

“Research/solutions” papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Cross-lingual information retrieval
• Patent classification
• Ontology-based retrieval
• Latent Semantic Analysis
• Information retrieval evaluation
• Evaluation frameworks
• Test collections
• Large-scale information retrieval experiments
• Parallel and distributed information retrieval
• Ranking strategies
• Query validation and query quality analysis
• Query expansion
• Interactive retrieval
• Session-based information retrieval
• User modeling
• Handling of noisy data (OCR/spelling/typing errors)
• XML retrieval
• NLP / Natural Language Processing”

“IP/needs” papers, which “shall present research challenges,” are invited on the following topics:

• “Patent search workflow
• Patent search strategies
• Information need of the patent researcher
• Shortcomings of current patent search tools
• Case studies
• Challenges in patent search
• Patent life cycle
• Quality of patent data”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Report on AsPIRe’10: The 1st International Workshop on Advances in Patent Information Retrieval

Dr. Allan Hanbury of the Information Retrieval Facility, and Veronika Zenz and Helmut Berger, both of Matrixware Information Services, have posted Workshop Report: 1st International Workshop on Advances in Patent Information Retrieval (AsPIRe’10), for the workshop held 28 March 2010 in Milton Keynes, England, UK, in conjunction with ECIR 2010: The 32nd European Conference on Information Retrieval.

The report summarizes the papers delivered at the workshop. Three of those papers reported research on the AsPIRe’10 dataset, “a collection of 400,000 patent documents in XML format.”

Here are the authors and titles of the papers presented at AsPIRe’10, with links to full text where available:

• Tao Jiang, Benjamin K. Tsou and Bin Lu, Part-of-speech Language Model for N-Best List Re-ranking in Experimental Chinese-English SMT;
• Richard Bache and Leif Azzopardi, Identifying Retrievability-Improving Model Features to Enhance Boolean Search for Patent Retrieval;
• Suzane Verberne, Eva D’hondt, Nelleke Oostdijk, and Cornelis H.A. Koster, Quantifying the Challenges in Parsing Patent Claims;
• Walid Magdy and Gareth J.F. Jones, A New Metric for Patent Retrieval Evaluation;
• Veronika Zenz, Sebastian Wurzer, Michael Dittenbach, and Edgardo Ambrosi, On the Effects of Indexing and Retrieval Models in Patent Search and the Potential of Result Set Merging.

US Patent & Trademark Data Available Free in Bulk XML / TIFF from Google

Full text XML, TIFF images, and bibliographic data for U.S. patents and trademarks are now available for bulk download free of charge from Google, according to a June 2, 2010 press release from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The trademark information includes data from 1870 to present, and the patent information includes data from 1976 to present.

According to the USPTO, the information available for download includes the following data or document types:

• “Patent grants and published applications
• Trademark applications
• Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) proceedings
• Patent classification information
• Patent maintenance fee events
• Patent and Trademark assignments.”

According to the USPTO, “The USPTO and Google will be working together to make additional data available in the future, including patent and trademark file histories and related data.”

This provision of access to legal information in XML in bulk, with accompanying metadata, all free of charge, seems consistent with the goals of the Law.gov legal open government data project.

Bashir & Rauber on Improving Retrievability of Patents in Prior-Art Search

Shariq Bashir and Professor Dr. Andreas Rauber, both of the Vienna University of Technology Information Software & Engineering Group, will present a paper entitled Improving Retrievability of Patents in Prior-Art Search, at ECIR 2010: The 32nd European Conference on Information Retrieval, to be held 28-31 March 2010 at Open University, in Milton Keynes, England, United Kingdom. Here is the abstract:

Prior-art search is an important task in patent retrieval. The success of this task relies upon the selection of relevant search queries. Typically terms for prior-art queries are extracted from the claim fields of query patents. However, due to the complex technical structure of patents, and presence of terms mismatch and vague terms, selecting relevant terms for queries is a difficult task. During evaluating the patents retrievability coverage of prior-art queries generated from query patents, a large bias toward a subset of the collection is experienced. A large number of patents either have a very low retrievability score or can not be discovered via any query. To increase the retrievability of patents, in this paper we expand prior-art queries generated from query patents using query expansion with pseudo relevance feedback. Missing terms from query patents are discovered from feedback patents, and better patents for relevance feedback are identified using a novel approach for checking their similarity with query patents. We specifically focus on how to automatically select better terms from query patents based on their proximity distribution with prior-art queries that are used as features for computing similarity. Our results show, that the coverage of prior-art queries can be increased significantly by incorporating relevant queries terms using query expansion.

Thanks to the authors for sending the abstract.