UniGE experiments on prior art search in the field of patents

Abstract

In this experiment led at the University of Geneva (UniGE), we evaluated several similarity measures as well as the relevance of using automated classification to filter out search results. The patent field is particularly well suited to classification-based filtering because each patent is already classified. Our results show that such a filtering approach does not improve searching performances, but it does not have a negative impact on recall either. This last observation allows considering classification as a possible tool to reduce the search space without reducing the quality of search results. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.