Scalable Patent Classification with Aggregated Multi-View Ranking

Abstract

Automated patent classification typically involves assigning labels to a patent from a taxonomy, using multi-class multi-label classification models. However, classification-based models face challenges in scaling to large numbers of labels, struggle with generalizing to new labels, and fail to effectively utilize the rich information and multiple views of patents and labels. In this work, we propose a multi-view ranking-based method to address these limitations. Our method consists of four ranking-based models that incorporate different views of patents and a meta-model that aggregates and re-ranks the candidate labels given by the four ranking models. We compared our approach against the state-of-the-art baselines on two publicly available patent classification datasets, USPTO-2M and CLEF-IP-2011. We demonstrate that our approach can alleviate the aforementioned limitations and achieve a new state-of-the-art performance by a significant margin.