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Search for Tomorrow: The Patent Office’s Growing Reliance on Technology to Locate Prior Art

Search for Tomorrow: The Patent Office’s Growing Reliance on Technology to Locate Prior Art. Andrew Chin chin @ unc . edu IPSC 2007. Patent Office Automation. 1984: Full-text search from 1976 (two terminals) 1991: Full-text search from 1971 1993-94: Desktop access

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Search for Tomorrow: The Patent Office’s Growing Reliance on Technology to Locate Prior Art

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  1. Search for Tomorrow:The Patent Office’s Growing Reliance on Technology to Locate Prior Art Andrew Chin chin @ unc . edu IPSC 2007

  2. Patent Office Automation • 1984: Full-text search from 1976 (two terminals) • 1991: Full-text search from 1971 • 1993-94: Desktop access • 1999: EAST, WEST interfaces • 2000: “Big transition” • 2001: Full-text search from 1920 (OCR) • 2005: USPTO completes move to Alexandria, leaving “shoes” behind

  3. MPEP § 904.02 • General Search Guidelines • Text search is powerful, but rarely sufficient by itself • “Some combination of text search with other criteria, in particular classification, would be a normal expectation in most technologies.”

  4. EAST/WEST Supported Queries • Terms: • Keywords, phrases • Classes, subclasses • Connectors: • Boolean operators • Proximity operators • Truncation (i.e., stemming) • Field restrictions

  5. Questions • Does keyword searching tend to diversify prior art? • Diversity of classes/subclasses? • Effect of subject matter variations? • Diversity of ages? • Pre-1976 (1971) citations? • Stratification in citability rate? • Time decay in citability rate?

  6. Data • Available: • U.S. patents from 1976 • Full text • Citations • Image File Wrappers from 8/2004 • Examiner’s Search Strategy & Results (ESSR) reports from 2006 (scanned) • Not available: • Citations derived from search results • Search engine query logs

  7. ESSR

  8. Synthetic Approach • Use Moby dictionary M (354,984 words) • Impute (Citing, Cited) to keyword search if there is a word wє M such that: • w appears in the claims and detailed descriptions of both Citing and Cited • w appears in the claims and detailed descriptions of no more than 50 total patents

  9. Growing Reliance on Keyword Search

  10. Technological Classes Amenable to Keyword Search

  11. Comments • Stephen Kunin: • Keyword searching is more useful in “the chemical area where the terms are better defined” • Nestor Ramirez, MPEP: • Examiners in mechanical arts tend to look at all the patents in the class; biotech and chemical examiners rely almost entirely on text search

  12. Questions • Does keyword searching tend to diversify prior art? • Diversity of classes/subclasses? • Effect of subject matter variations? • Diversity of ages? • Pre-1976 (1971) citations? • Time decay in citability rate? • Overall diversity? • Stratification in citability rate?

  13. Classification Diversity:By Subject Matter

  14. Keyword Search Preferencefor Post-1976 References

  15. Citability

  16. Alpha

  17. Beta

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