Patentopia: A multi-stage patent extraction platform with disambiguation for certain semantic challenges

Abstract

Bibliographic name disambiguation is an major semantic challenge, but critical to social sciences studies of important intellectual assets. Here we contribute to innovation research in several ways. We show a significant synonym problem in author names and discuss how a pre-processing heuristic step standardizing name variants helps, but homonyms generated with Chinese names are particularly difficult to resolve and manifest in an associated location list. Here we identify a new phenomenon of "onomastic profusion," the frequent use of certain words in firm names for semantic reasons that can confound disambiguation clustering algorithms. We illustrate these concerns with Patentopia, our customized platform accessing the PatentsView portal for the United States Patent and Trademark Office database and available for free academic use. This multi-stage system uses heuristics in concert with the PatentsView clustering process and reports meta-data to further assist analysis. As highly relevant use cases, we illustrate system performance with data derived from two important public innovation programs, I-Corps and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR), and we close with implications for bibliometric analysis of current patent data.

Deterministic Bibliometric Disambiguation Challenges in Company Names

“…We see eponymy in only one percent of our sample (estimated thirty observations). However, a significant clustering problem tied to A&P Technology was identified [15]; it was incorrectly associated with several firms, including G&H Technology, M&A Technology, and R&H Technology. It is not clear if these letters are chosen eponymously.…”

“…This equilibration is the origin of the previously observed onomastic profusion. It generates a new set of homonyms that can confound clustering or manual (supervised) disambiguation processes [15], similarly to the prevalence of certain names among Chinese authors [10].…”

“…This strategy, pursued in parallel by multiple companies, leads to certain words appearing in firm names at high frequency. In this paper, we expand on the first reports of this phenomenon, termed "onomastic profusion" [15]. We use a publicly available list of recipients of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I awards as a relevant sample to demonstrate how naming strategies impact bibliometrics.…”

Prospecção De Patentes E Tendências Tecnológicas Em Aeronaves Não Tripuladas De Reconhecimento, Observação E Combate

“…O Patentsview é uma plataforma de dados abertos que disponibiliza informações de patentes do USPTO. A ferramenta de API (Application Programming Interface) do site permite o acesso direto às informações por meio de programas como o Python e o R. Esses instrumentos de pesquisa favorecem a aplicação de metodologias consolidadas pela patentometria (Comins e Leydesdorff, 2018;Wang et al, 2019;Bianchi, Galaso, Palomeque, 2020;Toole, Jones e Madhavan, 2021) e, ademais, permitem formular novos métodos e processos de investigação das invenções (Belz et al, 2022;Binette et al, 2023;Lampe, 2023).…”