Patents are one of the most important innovative resources. It is a challenge and useful to discover technical topics and their relations from patents. A process framework is proposed to mine technical topics and construct their relation network from Chinese patents. The process consists of four stages. First, techni cal terms are extracted from patent texts and the equivalence index is selected to measure the link strength between them. Then, a clustering algorithm is used to group terms into topic clust ers, in which terms are connected by internal links, and topic clusters are connected by external links. Afterwards, all topics are cla ssified into three categories: isolated, principal and secondary. Finally, a technical topic network is created by using topic clusters a s nodes, external links as edges and the number of external links as weights. Experimental results on Chinese fuel cell patents show the method is effective in mining technical topics and mapping their relations, and the constructed network is helpful for technology innovation.
['Hongqi Han', 'Shuo Xu', 'Lijun Zhu', 'Xiaodong Qiao', 'Jie Gui', 'Zhaofeng Zhang']
Mining Technical Topic Networks from Chinese Patents