Patent Mining: A Baseline Approach

For NTCIR Workshop 7 UC Berkeley participated in both IR4QA and the Patent Mining Tasks. This paper summarizes our approach to Patent Mining. Our focus was upon the US Patent collection, and our methodology was to treat patent mining as an information retrieval task and to aggregate multiple patent classifications from retrieved patent documents. The performance was relatively poor, possibly because of retrieving too many documents, or because of non-utilization of blind feedback techniques