Patent Mining: A Survey

Patent documents are important intellectual resources of protecting interests of individuals, organizations and companies. Different from general web documents, patent documents have a well-defined format including frontpage, description, nclaims, and figures. However, they are lengthy and rich in technical terms, which requires enormous human efforts for analysis. Hence, a new research area, called patent mining, emerges in recent years, aiming to assist patent analysts in investigating, processing, and analyzing patent documents. Despite the recent advances in patent mining, it is still far from being well explored in research communities. To help patent analysts and interested readers obtain a big picture of patent mining, we thus provide a systematic summary of existing research efforts along this direction. In this survey, we first present an overview of the technical trend in patent mining. We then investigate multiple research questions related to patent documents, including patent retrieval, patent classification, and patent visualization, and provide summaries and highlights for each question by delving into the corresponding research efforts.