A Literature Review on Patent Information Retrieval Techniques

Objective: Patents are critical intellectual assets for any competitive business. They can prove to be a gold mine if retrieved, analyzed and utilized appropriately. Patentability search is an important step in the patent process and missing out any relevant patent may cause expensive legal consequences. As worldwide patent collection is growing rapidly, retrieval of this enormous knowledge source has become complex and exhaustive. This paper attempts to review the studies carried out in enhancing the relevance effectiveness of patent information retrieval. Method/Analysis: Literature review presents various research works that have been carried out to yield better results in patent retrieval task by refining existing information retrieval techniques or by using standard approaches at the various stages of the patent retrieval task. This work exclusively looks at literatures dealing with retrieval of patent text. Findings: Patent retrieval is not a completely solved research domain and general information retrieval approaches do not prove effective in this domain as patents are special documents posing various retrieval challenges. The review also highlights future research directions and will help researchers working in the domain of patent retrieval. Application/Improvement: Considering the various techniques and frameworks available and their limitations, there is a lot of scope in the field of patent retrieval techniques which makes room for further research to be taken up in this domain.