JP6734174B2 - Information processing equipment - Google Patents

Description

The present invention relates to an information processing device.

Conventionally, patent rights have been acquired by many companies for the purpose of protecting implementation plans and projects being implemented. Further, the patent right is a property right, and can be effectively used by assigning it to a third party, setting a dedicated license, or granting a non-exclusive license.

In order to obtain a patent right, in addition to the application, it is necessary to submit the attached documents of the application. Attached to the application are the claims, specification, drawings, and abstract.
Numerous researches and developments have been made on such a technology that supports the creation of the application attached documents (see, for example, Patent Document 1) and a technique that analyzes the text structure of the attached documents of the application (see, for example, Patent Document 2). ing.

JP, 2013-080278, A JP, 2014-010728, A

However, there has been a demand for realization of an appropriate method for evaluating the quality of publications such as specifications, but the conventional techniques including Patent Documents 1 and 2 cannot fully meet the demand.

The present invention has been made in view of such a situation, and an object thereof is to realize an appropriate evaluation method for quality of publications such as specification.

An information processing apparatus according to one aspect of the present invention is
The content of the first document that can be included in the official gazette relating to intellectual property rights is separated into predetermined unit information consisting of characters, figures, symbols, or combinations thereof, and the frequency distribution of the separated unit information is shown. First information generating means for generating one information;
Second information generating means for separating the content of the second document that may be included in the publication into the unit information and generating second information indicating the frequency distribution of the separated unit information;
Thirdly, each unit information in the second information is classified into a plurality of groups corresponding to each of the plurality of unit information of the first information, and a frequency distribution in which each of the plurality of groups after classification is shown as a unit is shown. Third information generating means for generating information,
For each unit information in the first information, the higher the rank difference between the frequency rank of each unit information in the first information and the rank rank of the corresponding group in the third information, the higher the score. Thus, the score is calculated, and the sum of the scores of the unit information in the first information is set as the total value of the score. The higher the total value of the score is, the higher the evaluation information of the contents of the publication is as evaluation information. An evaluation information generating unit that generates the evaluation information indicating the degree of fulfillment of the support requirement,
An information processing apparatus including.

According to the present invention, it is possible to realize an appropriate method for evaluating the quality of publications such as specifications.

1 is a block diagram showing a hardware configuration of a publication evaluation device as an embodiment of an information processing device to which the present invention is applied. FIG. 3 is a functional block diagram showing a functional configuration of the publication evaluation device of FIG. 2. It is a schematic diagram explaining the outline of the evaluation information generation process which the gazette evaluation device which has the functional structure of FIG. 3 is a flowchart illustrating a flow of evaluation information generation processing executed by the publication evaluation device having the functional configuration of FIG. 2.

Embodiments of the present invention will be described below with reference to the drawings.

FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing a hardware configuration of a publication evaluation device 1 as an embodiment of an information processing device of the present invention.

The publication evaluation device 1 includes a CPU (Central Processing Unit) 11, a ROM (Read Only Memory) 12, a RAM (Random Access Memory) 13, a bus 14, an input/output interface 15, an input unit 16, and an output unit. 17, a storage unit 18, a communication unit 19, and a drive 20.

The CPU 11 executes various processes according to a program recorded in the ROM 12 or a program loaded from the storage unit 18 into the RAM 13.
The RAM 13 also appropriately stores data and the like necessary for the CPU 11 to execute various processes.

The CPU 11, ROM 12, and RAM 13 are connected to each other via a bus 14. An input/output interface 15 is also connected to the bus 14. An input unit 16, an output unit 17, a storage unit 18, a communication unit 19, and a drive 20 are connected to the input/output interface 15.

The input unit 16 is composed of a keyboard, a mouse, and the like, and inputs various kinds of information according to an instruction operation by an operator.
The output unit 17 includes a display, a speaker, and the like, and outputs an image and sound.
The storage unit 18 includes a hard disk, a DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory), or the like, and stores various data.
The communication unit 19 controls communication with another device (not shown) via the network 4 including the Internet.

A removable medium 31 made up of a magnetic disk, an optical disk, a magneto-optical disk, a semiconductor memory, or the like is appropriately mounted on the drive 20. The program read from the removable medium 31 by the drive 20 is installed in the storage unit 18 as needed. Further, the removable medium 31 can also store various data stored in the storage unit 18 similarly to the storage unit 18.

In the present embodiment, the publication evaluation device 1 having such a configuration is a device that evaluates the quality of a specification that can be included in a patent publication, an application publication, or a utility model registration publication.
In the following description, the patent right will be described for the sake of convenience, but the same applies to the utility model right.

In order to obtain a patent right, in addition to the application, it is necessary to submit the claims, the description, the necessary drawings, and the abstract as an attachment to the application.

The claims should fulfill their mission as deeds of patent rights. That is, the technical scope of the patented invention is determined based on the description of the claims.
The description should fulfill its mission as a technical document that discloses the contents of the invention to a third party.
Here, with respect to the description of the claims, the requirement that "the invention for which a patent is sought is described in the detailed description of the invention" (hereinafter referred to as "support requirement") is required. There is. Specifically, in Japan, the support requirement is stipulated in Article 36(6)(i) of the Patent Act.
This support requirement is the reason for refusal in Japan (Patent Act Article 49 No. 4). In other words, the patent right cannot be acquired in Japan unless the statement meets the support requirements.
Therefore, whether or not the support requirement is satisfied is one of the important factors for the quality of the specification.
Therefore, the publication evaluation device 1 of the present embodiment, as the evaluation information for evaluating the content of the specification based on the frequency distribution of the words included in the claims and the frequency distribution of the words included in the specification, An evaluation value indicating the degree of fulfillment of the support requirement (hereinafter referred to as "support information fulfillment index") is generated.
Hereinafter, a series of processes until the evaluation information (support information fulfillment index) about the patent publication or application publication that is the evaluation object is generated is referred to as “evaluation information generation processing”.

FIG. 2 is a functional block diagram showing a functional configuration for executing the evaluation information generation process, of the functional configuration of the publication evaluation device 1.
In the CPU 11 of the publication evaluation device 1, when the evaluation information generation process is executed, the claim word frequency distribution generation unit 41, the specification word frequency distribution generation unit 42, the specification document meaning word frequency distribution generation unit 43, and the evaluation information. The generation unit 44 functions. The evaluation information generating unit 44 includes a weighting unit 51.
A publication information DB 61 is provided in an area of the storage unit 18 of the publication evaluation device 1.

The claim word frequency distribution generation unit 41 separates the content of the claims (contents of the claims) included in the patent publication or application publication that is the evaluation target into each word, and information indicating the frequency distribution of the separated words. (Hereinafter, referred to as “claim word frequency distribution”).

The specification word frequency distribution generation unit 42 separates the content of the specification contained in the patent publication or application publication to be evaluated into each word, and information indicating the frequency distribution of the separated words (hereinafter, “specification”). (Called word frequency distribution)).

Here, in generating the support information fulfillment index, the claim word frequency distribution and the statement word frequency distribution may be compared, but the comparison may not be an effective comparison. The reason for this will be described below.

However, in the specification, in addition to the above support requirements, the detailed description of the invention is "clear and sufficient enough that a person having ordinary knowledge in the technical field to which the invention belongs can carry out the invention. “Required in “.” (hereinafter referred to as “enablement requirement”) is also required. Specifically, in Japan, the enablement requirement is stipulated in Article 36(4)(i) of the Patent Act.
This enablement requirement is the reason for refusal in Japan (Patent Act Article 49-4). In other words, a patent right cannot be acquired in Japan unless the description satisfies the enablement requirement.
Here, since the scope of the claims has the character of the title as described above, the claims are generally described in a broader concept as much as possible so as to have a broad scope of rights. That is, each word appearing in the claim word frequency distribution is often a vague word of a superordinate concept.
On the other hand, in the specification, in order to satisfy the enablement requirement, a word indicating a specific technical content, that is, a subordinate concept that exemplifies the superordinate concept (the word described in the claims) There are many. That is, in the specification, a word showing a specific technical content often appears as a word for explaining a superordinate concept.
In other words, the word of the superordinate concept described in the claims is used as it is, and the embodiment in the specification is rarely described, but is described by the word of a plurality of subordinate concepts (exemplification). Many.
Therefore, even if the claim word frequency distribution and the specification word frequency distribution are compared as they are, they may not be effective comparisons.

Therefore, in the present embodiment, the specification document meaning word frequency distribution generation unit 43 classifies each word extracted from the specification into a plurality of groups corresponding to each of a plurality of words (superordinate concepts) in the claims. ..
Here, the method of classifying into a plurality of groups is not particularly limited, but in the present embodiment, the synonyms are classified into the same group on the assumption that the superordinate concept of the plurality of synonyms corresponds to one predetermined word in the claims. The classification method of doing is adopted.
The specification document synonym frequency distribution generation unit 43 generates information indicating a frequency distribution in units of each of a plurality of groups (groups corresponding to a plurality of words in the claims) after classification. Hereinafter, such information will be referred to as “specification document synonym frequency distribution”.

The evaluation information generating unit 44 generates a support information fulfillment index (evaluation information) based on the complaint word similarity distribution and the specification document meaning word frequency distribution.
For example, in the present embodiment, the evaluation information generation unit 44 determines the frequency ranking of words included in the claim word frequency distribution and the frequency of groups included in the specification document meaning word frequency distribution (groups corresponding to a predetermined word in the claim word frequency distribution). The similarity is calculated by comparing with the ranking. The evaluation information generation unit 44 generates the similarity or the processed value thereof as a support information fulfillment index (evaluation information).
Specifically, for example, the evaluation information generation unit 44 calculates, for each word in the claim word frequency distribution, a score based on the order difference from the corresponding group in the specification document meaning word frequency distribution, and calculates each score in the claim word frequency distribution. A support information fulfillment index (evaluation information) is generated based on the total value of the word scores.

FIG. 3 is a schematic diagram for explaining the outline of the evaluation information generation process executed by the publication evaluation device 1 having the functional configuration of FIG.

In the example of FIG. 3, in the frequency ranking of the claim word frequency 71, the first rank is “elastic body” and the second rank is “stress”.
Here, in the frequency ranking of the description word frequency 72, the first rank is “stress”, the second rank is “spring”, and the third rank is “rubber”. Therefore, when the claim word frequency 71 and the description word frequency 72 are compared in terms of frequency ranking, the claims and the specification are different from each other in the first place, and the “elastic body” in the first place in the claims is different. Is not ranked in the specification. As a result, when the support information fulfillment index (evaluation information) is simply generated based on this rank, the similarity may be low (the degree of coincidence is low), resulting in a low value.
Specifically, for example, if the ranks match, a score “1” is given, if the rank difference is 1, a score “0.9” is given, and if the rank difference is 2, a score “0” is given. .8” is given, and thereafter, each time the difference in rank increases, the score decreases by 0.1, and after the score becomes “0”, the score becomes uniform “0”. In this case, regarding the claim word frequency 71, the score of the first “elastic body” is “0.9” and the score of the second “stress” is “0”. If the total value of these scores is the support information fulfillment index (evaluation information), the value is “0.9”.
The reason why the support information enrichment index (evaluation information), which should originally be high, is low is that the superordinate concept of “elastic body” is associated with the subordinate concepts of “spring” and “rubber”. Because not.

Therefore, in the present embodiment, the specification document synonym frequency distribution generation unit 43 classifies the “spring” and the “rubber” extracted from the specification so as to belong to a group corresponding to “elastic body” in the claims. To do.
As a result of such classification, the statement document meaning word frequency 73 is generated. In the frequency ranking of the statement meaning frequency 73, the first place is a group to which "spring, group" belongs, that is, a group corresponding to "elastic body" in the claims. The second rank is a group to which "stress" belongs, that is, a group corresponding to "stress" in the claims.
In this case, since the ranks of the claim word frequency 71 and the specification document meaning word frequency 73 match, if the support information fulfillment index (evaluation information) is generated based on this rank, the similarity is high (matching degree). Is high).
Specifically, for example, in the case of using the higher-rank score, the score of the first “elastic body” is “1” and the score of the second “stress” is “1” in the claim word frequency 71. .. Therefore, the high value of the total value “2” of these scores becomes the support information fulfillment index (evaluation information).

Here, both the claim word frequency 71 and the specification document meaning word frequency 54 are distributions based on the appearance frequency of simple words. In some cases, the reliability of the support information enrichment index (evaluation information) obtained by comparing such simple appearance frequencies is not high.
Therefore, the evaluation information generating unit 44 of the present embodiment is provided with the weighting unit 51.

For example, when the score based on the above-mentioned frequency ranking is adopted, the evaluation information generation unit 44 can weight the score based on the rank of each word in the claim word frequency 71.
For example, even if the ranks match, if the first ranks match and the tenth ranks match, the former case is more likely to contribute to the overall similarity. It can be said to be expensive.
Therefore, the weighting unit 51 performs weighting so that the score when the first ranks match each other is high, and weights the score when the tenth ranks match each other is low. For example, weighting is performed such that the score when the first place matches with each other is “2”, while the score when the first place matches with each other is “0.2”.

Further, for example, the evaluation information generation unit 44 may weight the score for each word in the claim word frequency 71 based on the degree of association with each word belonging to the corresponding group in the specification document meaning word frequency 73.
For example, for the group corresponding to “elastic body” in the claims, “spring, rubber” is included in the corresponding group in the specification word meaning frequency 73. These are subordinate concepts of "elastic body", but the word "elastic body" itself does not belong to the group.
On the other hand, for the group corresponding to “stress” in the claims, the word “stress” itself is included in the corresponding group in the statement meaning frequency 73.
Therefore, the weighting unit 51 determines that the “stress” in the claims is more weighted than the “elastic body” in the claims, because the words having a higher degree of relevance belong to the corresponding group. Weight.

It is assumed that the support information fulfillment index (evaluation information) generated after various weighting is closer to the actual value. In other words, by weighting, it becomes possible to generate a more accurate support information fulfillment index (evaluation information).

Here, in the claim word frequency 71, a word different from the word that is a feature of the patented invention, for example, a general word such as “above” shown in FIG. 3, may be ranked higher in the frequency ranking. Therefore, such words may be removed as noise information.
That is, the evaluation information generation unit 44 removes the noise information (for example, the word “said”) from each word in the claim word frequency 71, and the total value of the score of each word after the noise information is removed. Based on, the support information enrichment index (evaluation information) is generated.

In this way, it is assumed that the support information fulfillment index (evaluation information) generated after noise removal has a value that is closer to the substance. That is, by removing the noise information, it is possible to generate the support information enrichment index (evaluation information) with higher accuracy.

FIG. 4 is a flowchart illustrating a flow of evaluation information generation processing executed by the publication evaluation device 1 having the functional configuration of FIG.

In step S1, the claim word frequency distribution generation unit 41 generates a claim word frequency distribution.
In step S2, the statement word frequency distribution generation unit 42 generates a statement word frequency distribution.
In step S3, the detailed document meaning word frequency distribution generation unit 43 generates a detailed document meaning word frequency distribution.
In step S4, the evaluation information generation unit 44 generates a support information fulfillment index (evaluation information) based on the claim word similarity distribution and the specification document meaning word frequency distribution.
As a result, the evaluation information generation process ends.

Although the embodiments of the present invention have been described above, the present invention is not limited to the above-described embodiments. Further, the effects described in the present embodiment are merely listed as the most suitable effects resulting from the present invention, and the effects according to the present invention are not limited to those described in the present embodiment.

For example, in the above-described embodiment, each word is extracted from the claims of the patent publication or application publication to generate the frequency distribution, and each word is extracted from the specification to generate the frequency distribution.
However, the present invention is not particularly limited to the above-described embodiment, and for example, a character, a figure, or a symbol or a combination thereof (hereinafter, referred to as “character or the like”) may be extracted from the specification, drawings, or abstract.
Furthermore, in the above-mentioned embodiment, although the gazette regarding a patent is adopted, it is not particularly limited to a patent, and an intellectual property right granted on the premise of submitting two or more types of documents including characters and the like. The present invention can be applied to the evaluation of general publications relating to the above.

Further, for example, in the above-described embodiment, the unit information of the frequency distribution is a word, but the unit information is not particularly limited to this, and arbitrary unit information composed of characters, figures, symbols, or a combination thereof may be adopted. it can.

In other words, the information processing apparatus to which this embodiment is applied only needs to have the following configuration, and can take various various embodiments.

That is, the information processing apparatus of the present invention is
The content of the first document (for example, the scope of claims) that can be included in the official gazette relating to intellectual property rights is separated into predetermined unit information (for example, word) composed of characters, figures, symbols, or a combination thereof, and separated. A first information generating unit (for example, a complaint word frequency distribution generation unit 41 in FIG. 2) that generates first information (for example, a complaint word frequency distribution) indicating the frequency distribution of the unit information afterwards;
The content of the second document (for example, the specification) that may be included in the publication is separated into the unit information (for example, words), and the second information (for example, the specification word frequency distribution) indicating the frequency distribution of the separated unit information is separated. ) Generating second information generating means (for example, the statement word frequency distribution generating unit 42 in FIG. 2),
Evaluation information generating means for generating evaluation information for evaluating the contents of the publication based on the first information and the second information;
Equipped with.

By adopting such an information processing device, it becomes possible to more appropriately evaluate a gazette concerning an intellectual property right.

The contents of the first document and the contents of the second document which may be included in the official gazette do not necessarily have to be copies of the official gazette, and if the official gazette is issued, the first document that would be included in the official gazette. And the contents of the second document.
In other words, publication of the gazette is not particularly essential, and information indicating the contents of the first and second documents may exist even at the stage of unapplied or unpublished after application. , “It can be included in the publication”.
Therefore, the contents of the first document and the second document that can be included in the gazette include, for example, the copy data held by the applicant regarding the “claims” and “specifications” that have not been published after the application. And the contents of documents (for example, an invention report prepared by the applicant) describing the contents of “claims” and “specifications” before application.
Further, the second user does not have to be an implementation candidate business operator in particular, and an intellectual property person in charge on the applicant side may be applicable.
From the above, for example, a person in charge of intellectual property on the side of a patent applicant (company) can evaluate a draft specification at the stage before application, so that a draft proposal with a low evaluation should be highly evaluated. It is also possible to apply after rewriting.

Further, such evaluation information can be applied to other fields such as patent analysis. For example, it can be used to correct (weight) the patent evaluation index based on the number of citations.
In addition, for example, when searching for license candidates based on patent analysis, a patent consisting of a statement with high evaluation information (support information fulfillment index) is given priority as a “high matching possibility” patent, and the license candidate is given priority. It is also possible to present it to a person or the like.

The series of processes described above can be executed by hardware or software.
In other words, the functional configuration of FIG. 3 is merely an example and is not particularly limited. That is, it is sufficient if the publication evaluation device 1 has a function capable of executing the above-described series of processing as a whole, and what kind of functional block is used to realize this function is not particularly limited to the example of FIG. ..
Further, one functional block may be configured by hardware alone, software alone, or a combination thereof.

When the series of processes is executed by software, a program forming the software is installed in a computer or the like from a network or a recording medium.
The computer may be a computer embedded in dedicated hardware. Further, the computer may be a computer capable of executing various functions by installing various programs, for example, a general-purpose personal computer.

The recording medium including such a program is not only configured by the removable medium 31 of FIG. 1 which is distributed separately from the apparatus main body to provide the program to the user, but is also installed in the apparatus main body in advance. It is composed of a recording medium provided to the. The removable medium 31 is composed of, for example, a magnetic disk (including a floppy disk), an optical disk, a magneto-optical disk, or the like. The optical disk is configured by, for example, a CD-ROM (Compact Disk-Read Only Memory), a DVD (Digital Versatile Disk), or the like. The magneto-optical disk is composed of MD (Mini-Disk) or the like. In addition, the recording medium provided to the user in a state of being pre-installed in the apparatus main body includes, for example, the ROM 12 in FIG. 1 in which the program is recorded, the hard disk included in the storage unit 18, and the like.

In the present specification, the steps for writing the program recorded in the recording medium include, not only the processing performed in time series according to the order, but also the processing performed in parallel or individually not necessarily in time series. It also includes the processing to be executed.

1... Publication evaluation device, 11... CPU, 12... ROM, 13... RAM, 14... Bus, 15... Input/output interface, 16... Input unit, 17... Output unit, 18... storage unit, 19... communication unit, 20... drive, 31... removable media, 41... complaint word frequency distribution generation unit, 42... statement word frequency Distribution generation unit, 43... Detailed document meaning word frequency distribution generation unit, 44... Evaluation information generation unit, 51... Weighting unit, 61... Publication information DB

Claims (2)

The content of the first document that may be included in the publication relating to intellectual property rights is separated into a plurality of unit information consisting of characters, figures, symbols, or combinations thereof, and the frequency distribution of the plurality of unit information after separation is divided. First information generating means for generating the first information shown,
Second information generating means for separating the content of the second document that can be included in the publication into a plurality of the unit information and generating second information indicating a frequency distribution of the plurality of unit information after the separation;
Each of the plurality of unit information in the second information is classified into one of a plurality of groups corresponding to each of the plurality of unit information in the first information, and each of the plurality of groups after classification is classified. Third information generating means for generating third information indicating a frequency distribution as a unit;
Ordering the frequency of the processing target in the first information and the frequency of the group corresponding to the processing target in the third information, with each of the plurality of unit information in the first information being processed. The score is calculated such that the smaller the difference in rank from is, the higher the score is, and the sum of the scores of each of the plurality of unit information in the first information is set as the total value of the score, and the total value of the score is An evaluation information generating unit that generates the evaluation information indicating the degree of fulfillment of the support requirement as the evaluation information that evaluates the contents of the publication to be higher,
Presentation means for presenting the evaluation information as information that contributes to the evaluation of the intellectual property right or the search for a candidate to whom the license of the intellectual property right is given.
An information processing apparatus including. The text of the first document that may be included in the publication relating to intellectual property rights is separated into a plurality of unit information having the meaning of the superordinate concept, and first information indicating the frequency distribution of the plurality of unit information after separation is generated. First information generating means,
The group of the superordinate concept that separates the sentence of the second document that can be included in the publication into a plurality of unit information having the meaning of the subordinate concept to the superordinate concept and includes one or more of the plurality of unit information after the separation. Second information generating means for generating a plurality of items of information, and generating second information indicating a frequency distribution in units of each of the plurality of superordinate concept groups,
The order of the frequency of the processing target in the first information and the order of the frequency of the group corresponding to the processing target in the second information, with each of the plurality of unit information in the first information being processed. The score is calculated such that the smaller the difference in rank from is, the higher the score is, and the sum of the scores of each of the plurality of unit information in the first information is set as the total value of the score, and the total value of the score is An evaluation information generating unit that generates the evaluation information indicating the degree of fulfillment of the support requirement as the evaluation information that evaluates the contents of the publication to be higher,
An information processing apparatus including.

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