BERT based patent novelty search by training claims to their own description

Abstract

In this paper we present a method to concatenate patent claims to their own description. By applying this method, BERT trains suitable descriptions for claims. Such a trained BERT (claim-to-description- BERT) could be able to identify novelty relevant descriptions for patents. In addition, we introduce a new scoring scheme, relevance scoring or novelty scoring, to process the output of BERT in a meaningful way. We tested the method on patent applications by training BERT on the first claims of patents and corresponding descriptions. BERT's output has been processed according to the relevance score and the results compared with the cited X documents in the search reports. The test showed that BERT has scored some of the cited X documents as highly relevant.