Automatic query generation for patent search

Patent search is the task of finding relevant existing patents, which is an important part of the patent's examiner's process of validating a patent application. In this paper, we studied how to transform a query patent (the application) into search queries. Three types of search features are explored for automatic query generation for patent search. Furthermore, different types of features are combined with a learning to rank method. Experiments based on a USPTO patent collection demonstrate that the single best search feature is the combination of words and noun-phrases from the summary field and the retrieval performance can be significantly improved by combining three types of search features.