Text Classification for Patents: Experiments with Unigrams, Bigrams and Different Weighting Methods

Abstract

Patent classification is becoming more critical as patent filings have been increasing over the years. Despite comprehensive studies in the area, there remain several issues in classifying patents on IPC hierarchical levels. Not only structural complexity but also shortage of patents in the lower level of the hierarchy causes the decline in classification performance. Therefore, we propose a new method of classification based on different criteria that are categories defined by the domain’s experts mentioned in trend analysis reports, i.e. Patent Landscape Report (PLR). Several experiments were conducted with the purpose of identifying type of features and weighting methods that lead to the best classification performance using Support Vector Machine (SVM). Two types of features (noun and noun phrases) and five different weighting schemes (TF-idf, TF-rf, TF-icf, TF-icf-based, and TF-idcef-based) were experimented on.