Current Challenges in Patent Information Retrieval

This second edition provides a systematic introduction to the work and views of the emerging patent-search research and innovation communities as well as an overview of what has been achieved and, perhaps even more importantly, of what remains to be achieved. It revises many of the contributions of the first edition and adds a significant number of new ones.

The first part “Introduction to Patent Searching” includes two overview chapters on the peculiarities of patent searching and on contemporary search technology respectively, and thus sets the scene for the subsequent parts. The second part on “Evaluating Patent Retrieval” then begins with two chapters dedicated to patent evaluation campaigns, followed by two chapters discussing complementary issues from the perspective of patent searchers and from the perspective of related domains, notably legal search. “High Recall Search” includes four completely new chapters dealing with the issue of finding only the relevant documents in a reasonable time span. The last (and with six papers the largest) part on “Special Topics in Patent Information Retrieval” covers a large spectrum of research in the patent field, from classification and image processing to translation. Lastly, the book is completed by an outlook on open issues and future research.

Several of the chapters have been jointly written by intellectual property and information retrieval experts. However, members of both communities with a background different to that of the primary author have reviewed the chapters, making the book accessible to both the patent search community and to the information retrieval research community. It also not only offers the latest findings for academic researchers, but is also a valuable resource for IP professionals wanting to learn about current IR approaches in the patent domain.

Mihai Lupu obtained his PhD degree in 2008 under the Singapore—MIT Alliance at the National University of Singapore, where he researched data retrieval in peer-to-peer networks. He is continuing his research in the area of information retrieval, with an emphasis on patent retrieval, cross-lingual retrieval and chemical structure retrieval evaluation. Previously, he organised the Chemical IR Evaluation campaign and the Patent Information Retrieval workshop series. Now at the TU Wien he has expanded his research interest into areas such as credibility of IR, eHealth, and multimodal search. 

Katja Mayer (PhD, University of Vienna) specialized in social studies of science and worked as a consultant, science communication officer and university lecturer. She has been interested in the historical and social implications of information retrieval applications. A focus of her research is on the public impact of search technologies and visualization. Her current research is devoted to data practices in computational social science in the context of the open science movement. She is associated faculty at the University of Vienna and the Technical University Munich.

Noriko Kando is a professor in the Information-society Research Division of the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan, and has been co-appointed as a professor in the Department of Informatics at the Graduate University of Advanced Studies, Japan. She initiated NTCIR, an evaluation of information-access technologies, such as information retrieval, summarization, question answering, and text mining, using East Asian languages and English documents, and has been a main designer of various tasks including patent retrieval.

Anthony (Tony) Trippe is Managing Director of Patinformatics, LLC. Tony has been a patent information professional for twenty-two years, and has spent the last twenty specializing in technical intelligence, patent analytics and patent landscapes. Tony is also an Adjunct Professor of IP Management and Markets at Illinois Institute of Technology teaching a course on patent analysis, and tools for strategic decision making. Mr. Trippe is an influential thought leader in the patent analysis space, has been named one of the Top 300 IP Strategists by IAM Magazine, and invented the term Patinformatics. He is also the author of the popular Patinformatics blog.