Finding nuggets in IP portfolios: core patent mining through textual temporal analysis

Patents are critical for a company to protect its core technologies. Effective patent mining in massive patent databases can provide companies with valuable insights to develop strategies for IP management and marketing. In this paper, we study a novel patent mining problem of automatically discovering core patents (i.e., patents with high novelty and influence in a domain). We address the unique patent vocabulary usage problem, which is not considered in traditional word-based statistical methods, and propose a topic-based temporal mining approach to quantify a patent's novelty and influence. Comprehensive experimental results on real-world patent portfolios show the effectiveness of our method.