An initial study of anchor selection in patent link discovery

Patents are a source of technical knowledge, but often difficult to understand. Technological solutions that would help understand the knowledge expressed in patents can assist the creation of new knowledge, and inventions. This paper explores anchor text selection for linking patents to external knowledge sources such as web pages and prior patents. While link discovery has been investigated in other domains, e.g., Wikipedia and the medical domain, the application of linking patents has received little attention and it presents some unique challenges as this paper shows. The paper contributes: (1) a test collection investigating the identification of anchor text (entities) in patent link discovery, (2) a user experiment studying the selection of anchors by users, and (3) an evaluation of four popular unsupervised keyword ranking methods (TFIDF, BM25, Keyphraseness, Termex) to identify potential anchors to link