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

Abstract

A system and method for a patent search and analytics software tool that finds prior art for each claim limitation/element by breaking up claims into individual claim limitations. Once the claims are separated, the system finds the best prior art for each of the individual separate, different claim limitations/elements. Additionally, the software finds the best prior art for entire claims, including non-patent literature (NPL) searching. The system takes 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 and then 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.