What is an AI Classifier?

Powerful artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques applied to patent searching

AI Classifiers are a machine learning and AI approach to finding patents relating to a certain technology.

AI Classifiers are an algorithm trained to identify patent families belonging to a technology. This is done by giving the algorithm examples of what should fall within (positive) and outside (negative) of your technology scope.

Benefits of Classifiers

• Accessible: You do not need to be a patent tool or technical expert to generate reports and insights
• Efficient: less patents need to be read by you/your team to obtain the same results
• Versatile: Classifiers can be used to find any broad or niche technology
• Smart: Cover your blind spots by having the system suggest patents to review

Once built, the Classifier sits in your account library and is available to use on demand. This means that it can be used repeatedly for any number of reports that you wish to generate. Below is an example of a set of classifiers. They may be broad in terms of technology scope or very narrow, depending on your exact requirements:

To determine and “learn” your definition for the technology of interest, the software evaluates claims, abstracts, keywords, citations, class-codes etc. from the patent metadata. This is different to usual forms of searching which rely on boolean and semantic searching.

The classifier can take anywhere from 1 hour to 1 day to build, depending on your subject-area knowledge and how broad or how narrow you would like the search to encompass. For example, if you wish to identify all patents related to your definition of ‘electric toothbrushes’, we need to train the algorithm using examples that fall within and outside of the technology you're defining.

Providing examples of what you are (electric hand-held device for cleaning teeth) and are not interested in (e.g. medical instruments used for oral surgery) helps the machine ‘learn’ to include/exclude them from the search. The benefit is that you don’t have to spend time thinking of all possible keywords and synonyms that could be used to describe this iteration of the technology.

How do I find and access Classifiers?

Classifiers will be included as part of your account if:

• You have a custom taxonomy of classifiers that have been built for you, or for your organisation
• You have access to the Universal Technology Taxonomy
• You are an n/d subscriber and have access to the AST taxonomy
• You have access to the classifier builder
• A colleague has transferred classifiers into your account

You can apply classifiers to a report from the Report Builder.

In each of the report types available to you via the Report Builder, you'll be asked to choose your grouping options for the report - whether you wish to apply classifiers (including UTT if it's part of your subscription) or clustering.

• Click 'Report Builder' to create a new report

• Depending on the report type you choose, you'll be asked to choose your grouping options at varying stages. As an example, we'll choose the landscape report:  

  

   

• Once you've selected your report options shown above, such as all families or only active families for example, select 'next'. In the next view, you're then asked to choose how you wish to group these patent families by technology. If you have classifier/s in your account, here you can choose which one/s to apply to your landscape report: