BERT based freedom to operate patent analysis
This is an incremental application of an existing method to a domain-specific problem in patent analysis.
The paper tackled the problem of automating freedom to operate patent analysis by fine-tuning BERT on patent descriptions to match independent claims, and tested it on a specific patent class with five inventions, but did not report concrete performance numbers.
In this paper we present a method to apply BERT to freedom to operate patent analysis and patent searches. According to the method, BERT is fine-tuned by training patent descriptions to the independent claims. Each description represents an invention which is protected by the corresponding claims. Such a trained BERT could be able to identify or order freedom to operate relevant patents based on a short description of an invention or product. We tested the method by training BERT on the patent class G06T1/00 and applied the trained BERT on five inventions classified in G06T1/60, described via DOCDB abstracts. The DOCDB abstract are available on ESPACENET of the European Patent Office.