DISCOVER SEMANTIC TOPICS IN PATENTS WITHIN A SPECIFIC DOMAIN

Patent topic discovery is critical for innovation-oriented enterprises to hedge the patent application risks and raise the success rate of patent application. Topic models are commonly recognized as an efficient tool for this task by researchers from both academy and industry. However, many existing well-known topic models, e.g., Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which are particularly designed for the documents represented by word-vectors, exhibit low accuracy and poor interpretability on patent topic discovery task. The reason is that 1) the semantics of documents are still under-explored in a specific domain 2) and the domain background knowledge is not successfully utilized to guide the process of topic discovery. In order to improve the accuracy and the interpretability, we propose a new patent representation and organization with additional inter-word relationships mined from title, abstract, and claim of patents. The representation can endow each patent with more semantics than word-vector. Meanwhile, we build a Backbone Association Link Network (Backbone ALN) to incorporate domain background semantics to further enhance the semantics of patents. With new semantic-rich patent representations, we propose a Semantic LDA model to discover semantic topics from patents within a specific domain. It can discover semantic topics with association relations between words rather than a single word vector. At last, accuracy and interpretability of the proposed model are verified on real-world patents datasets from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The experimental results show that Semantic LDA model yields better performance than other conventional models (e.g., LDA). Furthermore, our proposed model can be easily generalized to other related text mining corpus.