Query refinement for patent prior art search

A patent is a contract between the inventor and the state, granting a limited time period to the inventor to exploit his invention. In exchange, the inventor must put a detailed description of his invention in the public domain. Patents can encourage innovation and economic growth but at the time of economic crisis patents can hamper such growth. The long duration of the application process is a big obstacle that needs to be addressed to maximize the benefit of patents on innovation and economy. This time can be significantly improved by changing the way we search the patent and non-patent literature.Despite the recent advancement of general information retrieval and the revolution of Web Search engines, there is still a huge gap between the emerging technologies from the research labs and adapted by major Internet search engines, and the systems which are in use by the patent search communities.In this thesis we investigate the problem of patent prior art search in patent retrieval with the goal of finding documents which describe the idea of a query patent. A query patent is a full patent application composed of hundreds of terms which does not represent a single focused information need. Other relevance evidences (e.g. classification tags, and bibliographical data) provide additional details about the underlying information need of the query patent. The first goal of this thesis is to estimate a uni-gram query model from the textual fields of a query patent. We then improve the initial query representation using noun phrases extracted from the query patent. We show that expansion in a query-dependent manner is useful.The second contribution of this thesis is to address the term mismatch problem from a query formulation point of view by integrating multiple relevance evidences associated with the query patent. To do this, we enhance the initial representation of the query with the term distribution of the community of inventors related to the topic of the query patent. We then build a lexicon using classification tags and show that query expansion using this lexicon and considering proximity information (between query and expansion terms) can improve the retrieval performance. We perform an empirical evaluation of our proposed models on two patent datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed models can achieve significantly better results than the baseline and other enhanced models

Patron-Clientelism and Community Participation: Lessons From an Urban Poverty Alleviation Project in Bangladesh

This paper explores the logic of patronage and its manifestation in a community-driven development project in two poor urban settlements in Bangladesh. It is seen from the case study that long-term patron-clientelistic relationship has been more dominant than a short-term based brokerage system due to the existing typical socio-political culture in Bangladesh. The exertion of patron-clientelistic relationship depends primarily on the community specific socio-political context. This paper opines that the presence of multi-political parties’ influence in a community reduces the dominance of patron-clientistic logic in shaping social relationship. This in turn contributes to a more meaningful participation

Impact of COVID-19 on Wages of the Labours in India

We know about Plague Pandemic, Cholera Pandemic, Influenza Pandemic and the most recent Covid-19 Pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic is world’s one of the dangerous human calamities. In the year 2020, Covid-19 have impacted human lives and survival in various ways. One of the ways in which Covid-19 have impacted on human lives in affecting the wages of labour in India. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, India went under a lockdown condition for over three months. This lockdown has created a big depreciative influence on the economy which eventually impacted on business and their labours. In the year 2020 during second wave of Covid-19, over 10 million people lost their jobs and 97 percent households in the country have witnessed decline in incomes. The government is working hard to recover the loss as well as to secure the lives in the country

DEVELOPMENT OF AN INNOVATIVE PROCESS FOR THE UP-CYCLING OF CONCRETE WASTE

International audienceThis study investigates the efficiency of the electrofragmentation technology for the up-cycling of concrete waste. Tests were performed at continuous scale at various operating conditions and showed that high liberation and recovery rates of aggregates were obtained after just one treatment step performed at 1 kWh/t. These results confirmed then the potential of the electrofragmentation technology for the selective recovery of the natural aggregates contained in concrete waste

Modeling neurocognitive and neurobiological recovery in addiction

This book focuses on "what to know" and "how to apply" information, prioritizing novel principles and delineating cutting-edge assessment, phenotyping and treatment tools