Conceptual Search for Patent Similarity Match

A patent is a form of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from using the invention for a limited period of years. Patent rights fall under civil-law and can lead to a million-dollar lawsuit for infringement of the inventor's rights. For an invention to be published in the form of a patent, an extensive search has to be done to assess and ascertain that there is no previous work that undermines the right of any other patent holder. Currently, the search for prior art for a patent is based on basic keyword triggering with some concept and terms indexing linked to the queried keywords. In this paper, we propose a system which can be used efficiently for searching prior art conceptually based on a complete patent as an input. Experimental results show that our approach is an effective way to analyse a patent semantically. Our method provides an effective approach for inventors to do a conceptual prior-art search on existing inventions.