Analyzing multilingual knowledge innovation in patents

In the process of analyzing knowledge innovation, it is necessary to identify the existing boundaries of knowledge so as to determine whether knowledge is new – outside these boundaries. For a patent to be granted, all aspects of the patent request must be studied to determine the patent innovation. Knowledge innovation for patent requests depends on analyzing current state of the art in multiple languages. Currently the process is usually limited to the languages and search terms the patent seeker knows. The paper describes a model for representing the patent request by a set of concepts related to a multilingual knowledge ontology. The search for patent knowledge is based on Fuzzy Logic Decision Support and allows a multilingual search. The model was analyzed using a twofold approach: a total of 104,296 patents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office were used to analyze the patent extraction process, and patents from the Korean, US, and Chinese patent offices were used in the analysis of the multilingual decision process. The results display high recall and precision and suggest that increasing the number of languages used only has minor effects on the model results.