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NTCIR-7 Patent Mining Task
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION


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Task Overview

Background

The need for academic researchers to retrieve patents and research papers is increasing, because applying for patents is now considered to be an important research activity. In fact, the development of an IR system of research papers and patents for academic researchers is enshrined in " Intellectual Property Strategic Program 2006" by Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters Japan, published in June 2006.

Searching both research papers and patents is also required for examiners in government patent offices, and for searchers in the intellectual property divisions of private companies. Their particular purpose is to carry out an invalidity search on existing patents or research papers that can invalidate the patents of rival companies or patents under application in a patent office. Therefore, the NTCIR-7 Patent Mining Task aims to develop several techniques for retrieving and classifying research papers and patents.

The task at NTCIR-7

  Details of the dry run and the formal run will be available via round-table meetings and the "Participants only" page.

All the participants who attended the previous NTCIR patent classification task can apply their systems to this task with minor modification (F-term -> IPC). The participants who attended the previous NTCIR patent retrieval task can also attend this task with minor modification. (Please see the following steps.)

  1. Extract queries from a given abstract, and retrieve related patents using search engines for NTCIR-5 and 6.
  2. Extract IPC codes from retrieved patents in step 1.
  3. Rank IPC codes by their frequency.

Objective of NTCIR-7 Patent Mining Task

The terms used in patents are generally more abstract than those used in research papers for the purpose of enlarging the scope of the claims. The NTCIR-7 Patent Mining Task aims to construct basic technologies for cross-genre document classification and information retrieval.

Roadmap

The results of the NTCIR Patent Mining Task can be applied to the following tasks.

Technical Trend Analysis using Research Papers and Patents

The purpose of this task is to create technical trend maps, as shown in Figure 1, from a set of research papers and patents, which a particular IPC code is assigned. In Figure 1, red and blue character strings indicate research papers and patents, respectively.

Figure 1 An example of a technical trend map created from a set of research papers and patents
Effect 1Effect 2Effect 3
Technology 1 [AAA 1993]
[US Pat. XX/XXXX]
[BBB 2002]
Technology 2 [CCC 2000]
Technology 3 [US Pat. YY/YYYY] [US Pat. ZZ/ZZZZ]
[USP WW/WWWW]

Technical Trend Mining Using Citation Relationships between Research Papers and Patents

Recently, many researchers in scientmetrics focus on the technical trend analysis using patents and research papers in terms of measuring the releavnce of basic science to industry. In their works, the citations between patents and research papers are used to analyse their effects of science to technology. In general, if basic research in a domain strongly affects a technology, then it is assumed that patents in that specific domain will cite many papers. Therefore, the researchers measure the relevance of basic research to an industry by counting the number of cited research papers in patents in a given domain. Please refer to the following paper about the detail of the studies in this domain.

Mayer, M. Does Science Push Technology? Patents Citing Scientific Literature. Research Policy. Vol. 29, 409-434 (2000)

On the other hand, it is said that the citations of related research papers in patents are not enough. Therefore, the following steps are required for more reliable technical trend analysis using citations.

  1. Categorization of research papers into a patent classification system:
    To categorize research papers into the IPC. (NTCIR-7)
  2. Detection of related research papers:
    To detect research papers that should be cited in patents from a set of research papers, which the same IPC codes are assigned in the previous step.
  3. Technical trend mining based on the citations between research papers and patents:
    To analyze technical trend using the citation relationships between research papers and patents. The following tasks are assumed: "Analyzing transition of technical trend", "Detecting important techniques in a specific domain", and "Detecting research papers that can invalidate existing claims".

Data used

Application Procedure

Application form is available at this page.

Schedule

Preparation Call For Participation -2007.11.15
Data release As needed.
Dry run Topic release 2008.01.10
Submission deadline 2007.02.10
Evaluation release 2007.03.05
Analysis of the evaluation 2008.03
Formal run Topic release 2008.05.01 2008.05.14
Submission deadline 2008.05.31 2008.06.13
Evaluation release 2008.06.10 2008.06.23
Analysis of the evaluation 2008.07
Preparation for meeting Paper for the Proceedings Due 2008.10.01
Camera-ready Paper for the Proceedings Due 2008.12.16-19
Workshop Meeting at Tokyo 2008.12.16-19

  Changes in schedule will be announced via this page and the mailing list for participants.

Organizers

Contact

 

Last modified on May 3, 2008