Patent prior-art search is concerned with finding all filed patents relevant to a given patent application. We report a comparison between two search approaches representing the state-of-the-art in patent prior-art search. The first approach uses simple and straightforward information retrieval (IR) techniques, while the second uses much more sophisticated techniques which try to model the steps taken by a patent examiner in patent search. Experiments show that the retrieval effectiveness using both techniques is statistically indistinguishable when patent applications contain some initial citations. However, the advanced search technique is statistically better when no initial citations are provided. Our findings suggest that less time and effort can be exerted by applying simple IR approaches when initial citations are provided.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. CNGL, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin, 9, Ireland

   Walid Magdy & Gareth J. F. Jones

2. INRIA & Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin, Germany

   Patrice Lopez

Editors and Affiliations

1. Information School, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, S1 4DP, Sheffield, UK

   Paul Clough

2. CLARITY: Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland

   Colum Foley , Cathal Gurrin  & Hyowon Lee ,  & 

3. Centre for Next Generation Localisation, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Glasnevin, Dublin 9, Ireland

   Gareth J. F. Jones

4. TNO Human Factors, Brassersplein 2, 2612 CT, Delft, The Netherlands

   Wessel Kraaij

5. Yahoo! Research, 177 Diagonal, 08018, Barcelona, Spain

   Vanessa Mudoch

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