Patent Mining: A Survey

Patent documents are important intellectual resources of protecting interests of individuals, organizations and com-panies. Different from general web documents, patent doc-uments have a well-defined format including frontpage, de-scription, claims, and figures. However, they are lengthy and rich in technical terms, which requires enormous human ef-forts for analysis. Hence, a new research area, called patent mining, emerges in recent years, aiming to assist patent ana-lysts in investigating, processing, and analyzing patent doc-uments. 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 sum-mary 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 re-trieval, patent classification, and patent visualization, and provide summaries and highlights for each question by delv-ing into the corresponding research efforts