Extraction of Morphological Features of Technical
Systems from Russian Patent
Anatoliy Kharitonov1, Dmitriy Korobkin1[0000-0002-4684-1011], Sergey Fomenkov1[0000-0001-
9907-4488]
, Sergey Kolesnikov1[0000-0002-6910-7151]
1
Volgograd State Technical University, Lenin av. 28, Volgograd, Russia
dkorobkin80@mail.ru
Abstract. The task of automation of the synthesis of innovative solutions in the
field of technical systems and technologies is one of the most priority problems
of science. The authors propose to automate the most important, initial stages of
the design of new technical systems and technologies based on updated
knowledge bases obtained from the world patent database, including the
RosPatent patent database. According to the method of morphological analysis
and synthesis, it is assumed that the main structural features (functions of
technical objects) are extracted from some technical solution (patent). All these
features are reduced to a morphological matrix, combined, which gives a lot of
new solutions. The paper describes the developing a software for extracting the
descriptions of the technical functions from Russian patents. The grammar of
the presentation of technical functions descriptions according to the model
“Action-Object-Condition” in the Russian-language patents was formed;
algorithms for the initial processing of the patent database, the extraction of
technical functions through the analysis of dependency trees, the formation of
the morphological matrix was developed. The software consisting of a module
of patent database processing; a module of text segmentation of the patent
formula; a module of semantic text analysis; a module of extracting descriptions
of technical functions; a module of presenting the results of patent database
processing, was tested to solve practical problems.
Keywords. Technical functions, Natural Language processing, patents,
RosPatent, Link Grammar Parser, grammar.
1 Introduction
The task of automation of the synthesis of innovative solutions [1,2] in the field of
technical systems and technologies is one of the most priority problems of science.
Authors of work suggest [3,4] to carry out automation of the major, initial stages of
design of new technical systems and technologies based on the updated knowledge
bases received from the world patent array [5,6], including the patent base of
RosPatent [7].
___________________________
Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
In: P. Sosnin, V. Maklaev, E. Sosnina (eds.): Proceedings of the IS-2019 Conference, Ulyanovsk, Russia,
24-27 September 2019, published at http://ceur-ws.org
206
The new design decision with new properties that did not meet earlier is the result
of the synthesis of an invention. Structural synthesis [1] implies the existence of a
certain technical function, for which it is necessary to define some object or system
that implements this technical function under certain conditions and restrictions.
According to the method of morphological analysis and synthesis [1], it is assumed
that the main structural features are extracted from some technical solutionы
(alternative options). All these features are reduced to a morphological matrix,
combined, which gives a lot of new solutions. One of the varieties of morphological
analysis is the approach [8,9], where the functions of individual objects (it’s elements)
are taken as features. In this case, alternatives are the various implementations of
these functions.
The algorithm of morphological analysis and synthesis contains the following
sequential procedures:
identification of the main features of the object;
preparation of the form for filling the morphological matrix;
the matrix fill the alternatives;
choice of the best solutions;
formation of the technical solution.
The purpose of the work is to carry out the extraction of technical functions from the
RosPatent patents and present them in the form of a morphological matrix, which is
the basis of the procedure for the synthesis of new design solutions.
2 The developed methods
2.1 The algorithm of patent database analysis
According to the results of the research, which consisted of the analysis of the subject
area of patenting of inventions, familiarity with the structure of the patent, linguistic
analysis of the patent formula, review of existing automated methods for the synthesis
of new technical solutions, study of the stages of automatic text processing, the
algorithm of the analysis of the patent array was proposed.
The input of the algorithm is a folder with patents granted by the Russian patent
department. Technical functions are extracted from the texts of patent formulas, in
which verbs determine the main action and which will unambiguously describe the
essence of the invention. Then classes of actions of verbs are defined, thus forming
generalized technical functions, and the functions themselves are written in the
implementation variants (alternatives) of the selected generalized functions.
The output of the algorithm is a morphological matrix, presented visually on a
program screen form and visually displaying the versions (alternatives) of the
generalized technical function. The obtained morphological matrix can be used for the
search of the fundamental idea for the synthesis of the new technical solution.
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2.2 Extraction of descriptions of technical functions from patents
The following information is taken from an XML file of the RosPatent patent:
… is number of the patent;
… is date of issue of the patent;
… is the name of the patent;
… are references to other patents which are inspiration
sources;
… list of inventors;
… is an invention formula.
Directly the text of a patent formula is put into the tags , (1)
where D – a set of the actions made and resulting in the desired result; G – a set of
objects to which these actions are directed; H – a set of special conditions and
restrictions of the performed operations.
The analysis of the set of sentences showed that the segments of patent formulas
have a similar syntactic structure. This observation made it possible to construct a
context-sensitive grammar (2) to extract the model components (1) from sentences of
the patent formula by analyzing the links:
Gram = (T, N, , R), (2)
where T = {action, object, condition} is a set of terminals; N = {, ,
, , , , } – set of non-terminals; – initial non-terminal [13];
R is the set of production rules:
→ action | action | action | action
| ε
Action → action | action
action → action | action | action
action → action action | action action | action
action
action → action action | action action | action
action
→ object | object | object | object
| object
object → object object | object object | object
object
object → object object object| object object |
object object | object object
condition → condition | condition | condition
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condition → condition condition | condition
condition
condition → condition condition | condition condition
| condition condition | condition condition
→ |
→ |
→ | |
The output of a sentence using this grammar means that a word in a sentence at the
position of a terminal refers, respectively, to an action, object, or condition, depending
on the type of terminal.
The links found by the parser are interpreted to represent a technical function
according to the model (1). By analyzing certain types of relationships, you can
discover words that are objects of action, the action itself, and the condition of the
action (i.e., to define syntactic category).
The structuring of the set of possible values of the component D “Action” was
made on the basis of a set of terms, the most common in the description of the
functions of technical objects (for example, in the International patent classification),
as well as selected through the analysis of unstructured information under the heading
“Practical application” [14] available to the authors of the article of the Physical
Effects (PhE) database (1200 descriptions of PhE) [15].
Action classifier (D) [2]:
Transformation; Destruction;
Change; Accumulation;
Increase; Issuance;
Decrease; Research;
Measurement; Treatment;
Connection; Management;
Separation; Control;
Stabilization; Passing;
Destabilization; Isolation.
Creation;
Using this classifier allows you to find a common class for cured actions from
patent formulas. The general class will be a feature in the morphological matrix, and
the actions themselves, with their objects and conditions, will be the implementation
variants (alternatives) of this feature.
2.4 Example of extracting technical functions from patents
The text of the patent: “A signal converter that provides the formation of a code word
of digital data according to the method of constructing the code word”.
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Fig. 1. Example of the tree of analysis of Link Grammar Parser
From the tree of dependencies shown in Figure 1 according to grammar (2) we
receive the following:
→
→ provides
→ provides the formation
→ provides the formation < a > words
→ provides the formation of a code word
→ provides the formation of a code word data
→ provides the formation of a code word of digital data
→ provides the formation of a code word of digital data
according to
→ provides the formation of a code word of digital data
according to the method
→ provides the formation of a code word of digital data
according to the method of construction
→ providing the formation of a code word of digital data
according to the method of constructing words
→ provides the formation of a code word of digital data
according to the method of constructing the code word.
The components of the technical function according to the developed model (1)
recognized in the text of the patent formula will be as follows:
Action (D) = “provides the formation”;
Object (G) = “of a code word of digital data”;
Condition (H) = “according to the method of constructing the code word.
2.5 Formation of the morphological matrix
The obtained components of the technical function representation according to the
DGH (1) model, recognized in the sentence segments of patent formulas, technical
functions are entered in the matrix together with the selected generalized technical
function (TF) according to the action classifier (D) (Table 1).
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Table 1. Extracted technical functions
Generalized
No Action (D) Object (G) Condition (H)
TF
1 provides the of a code word of according to the method of Creation
formation digital data constructing the code word
2 performs sandwiched on the postoperative data Treatment
3 the result of a modulating signal from the IFFT calculator Creation
generating
4 forms pressure in an empty cylindrical form Creation
Based on the generalized technical functions, a morphological matrix is
constructed in which technical functions in the form of “object-condition-action”
tuples of DGH (1) are used as alternatives to the execution of generalized technical
functions. When building a morphological matrix (Table 2), all found actions (D) are
viewed and those actions that have the same generalized technical function are
recorded in the same column of the morphological matrix with their object and
conditions.
Table 2. Morphological matrix
Creation Treatment …
D – provides the formation D – performs …
G – of a code word of digital data G – the inverse fast Fourier transform
H – according to the method of H – on the postoperative data
constructing the code word
D – the result of generating … …
G – a modulating signal
H – from the IFFT calculator
D – forms … …
G – pressure
H – in an empty cylindrical form
The designer chooses the sign, i.e. the generalized technical function interesting
him from the received morphological matrix, and in a column with the corresponding
name looks through all possible alternatives of its execution. The review of the
possible ways of realization of some function concentrated in one place can prompt
the user the idea of improvement of the available design or creation of the absolutely
new technical solution.
3 Results
The extracted technical functions and the morphological table are stored in the RDD
(Resilient Distributed Dataset) scheme, which is used for the most rapid processing of
patent data using MapReduce technology [16]. For extraction of technical functions
from patent documents, the software consisting of 5 blocks is created:
block of processing of the input patent document;
block of segmentation of the text of the patent formula;
block of semantic text analysis;
212
block of extraction descriptions of technical functions;
block for presenting the results of the processing of the patent databases.
4 Conclusion
The theoretical value of this work is: in the developed grammar of the description of
technical functions in the texts of Russian patents; in the algorithms of the primary
processing of the patent array, the extraction of technical functions through the
analysis of dependency trees, the formation of the morphological matrix.
The functionality of the software has been tested on a set of test tasks.
Fig. 2. Data Flow Diagram
Acknowledgment
The reported study was funded by RFBR (research project 18-07-01086), RFBR and
Administration of the Volgograd region (projects 19-47-340007, 19-41-340016).
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