Automatically separating claim into elements/limitations and automatically finding art for each element/limitation

Abstract

The present invention is a patent search and analytics software tool (Zuse) that finds prior art for each claim limitation/element. The software automatically breaks up every claim into individual claim limitations. For example, our software can automatically break up a claim into about five (5) separate, different claim limitations/elements. Then, it can find the best prior art for each of the five (5) separate, different claim limitations/elements. This is very helpful when you cannot find a prior art reference for only part of a claim. Also, the software finds the best prior art for the entire claims. Our software also includes non-patent literature (NPL) searching. ZUSE identifies relevant prior art by taking into account the limitations of the claim under consideration (query claim of query patent), the text of the art, the link structure of the citation network, and the patent classification. The present invention constructs a network that consists of two types of nodes: (i) the art (patents and non-patent literature) and the (ii) classes of the patent classification. Each art node is linked to all the art nodes that it cites and is linked to all the classification nodes that it belongs to.

1 . A system comprising: a patent search tool that automatically separates a claim into limitations or elements, and finds prior art references for every limitation or element. 
     
     
         2 . A system comprising: a patent search tool that produces a patent validity score utilizing the factors: similar text segments, abstract score, sibling score, classification score, and random walk score. 
     
     
         3 . A system comprising: a patent search tool that produces a patent quality score utilizing the factors: similar text segments, abstract score, sibling score, classification score, and random walk score.