Abstract
For a researcher in a field with high industrial relevance, retrieving research papers and patents has become an important aspect of assessing the scope of the field. However, retrieving patents using keywords is a laborious task for researchers, because the terms used in patents (patent terms) are often more abstract than those used in research papers (scholarly terms) or in ordinary language, to try to widen the scope of the claims. We propose a method for translating scholarly terms into patent terms (e.g. translating “word processor” into “document editing device” or “document writing support system”). To translate scholarly terms into patent terms, we propose two methods: the “citation-based method” and the “thesaurus-based method”. We also propose a method combining these two with the existing “Mase’s method”. To confirm the effectiveness of our methods, we conducted some examinations, and found that the combined method performed the best in terms of recall, precision, and ε, which is an extensional measure of Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) widely used for the evaluation of question-answering systems.
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Notes
- 1.
Generally, technical terms are defined as terms used in a particular research field. Based on this definition, “floppy disc” or “word processor” are not technical terms, because they are commonly used. In this paper, we define “scholarly terms” as terms used in research papers, even though they may also be used more generally, such as “floppy disc” or “word processor”.
- 2.
We define the task of “translation of scholarly terms into patent terms” as “to output all useful patent terms for patent retrieval”. In many cases, patent terms are hypernyms or synonyms of a given scholarly term, and include a part of scholarly terms.
- 3.
http://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/titeki2/keikaku2009_e.pdf. Cited 30 June 2010.
- 4.
In this case, the scholarly term “floppy disc” was already inserted in the “title” field.
- 5.
For example, when a scholarly term “floppy disc” is given, the thesaurus-based method output its hypernyms, such as “removable recording medium”, as patent terms.
- 6.
We will report this experimental result later.
- 7.
When Mase’s method outputs three candidate terms “magnetic recording device” (freq. 10), “removable storage device” (freq. 5), and “information recording medium” (freq. 3), the three words “device” (freq. 10), “device” (freq. 5), and “medium” (freq. 3) are extracted from the terms.
- 8.
For the example in Step 2, “device” (score 15) and “medium” (score 3) are obtained. Then, the scores of the words are normalised by dividing by 15, which is the score for “device”, resulting in “device” (score 1) and “medium” (score 0.2).
- 9.
For example, if the citation-based method obtained a term “recording medium” (score 0.5), a score 0.2×m for “medium” is added to 0.5. Here, m is a parameter that indicates the influence of Mase’s method on the citation-based method. We will describe how to determine m in Sect. 19.5.1.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
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Nanba, H., Kamaya, H., Takezawa, T., Okumura, M., Shinmori, A., Tanigawa, H. (2011). Automatic Translation of Scholarly Terms into Patent Terms. In: Lupu, M., Mayer, K., Tait, J., Trippe, A. (eds) Current Challenges in Patent Information Retrieval. The Information Retrieval Series, vol 29. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19231-9_19
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