The Journal of Intellectual Property (J Intellect Property; JIP)

KCI Indexed
OPEN ACCESS, PEER REVIEWED

pISSN 1975-5945
eISSN 2733-8487

A Study on the Performance Improvement of Automatic Intellectual Property Counseling Classification: Using the Transformer-based AI Model BERT

CONTENTS

Research article

Citation: Noh DH et al. 2024. A Study on the Performance Improvement of Automatic Intellectual Property Counseling Classification: Using the Transformer-based AI Model BERT. The Journal of Intellectual Property 19(1), 159-177.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.34122/jip.2024.19.1.7

The Journal of Intellectual Property, 2024 March, 19(1): 159-177. 

Received on 21 December 2023, Revised on 30 January 2024, Accepted on 29 February 2024, Published on 30 March 2024.

A Study on the Performance Improvement of Automatic Intellectual Property Counseling Classification: Using the Transformer-based AI Model BERT

Dong-Hun Noh1,2*, Jae-Ok Min1,3, So-Youn Woo4,5

1Doctoral Candidate, Department of Intellectual Property Convergence, Chungnam National University, Republic of Korea

2Manager, R&D Planning Team, Korea Institute of Patent Information, Republic of Korea

3Manager, R&D Team, Korea Institute of Patent Information, Republic of Korea

4Graduate Student, Department of Intellectual Property Convergence, Chungnam National University, Republic of Korea

5Korea Invention Promotion Association, Republic of Korea

*Corresponding Author: Dong-Hun Noh (laborh@kipi.or.kr)

Abstract

Intellectual property customer counseling is an important public service that supports the creation of intellectual property rights and protection of the rights and interests of applicants and rights holders. To effectively support customers and secure the use of counseling content as a policy, counseling contents are classified according to certain criteria. Until 2020, it was professional counselors who directly classified these contents, but 2021 saw a shift toward automatic classification based on text analysis (TA) of the consultation texts. However, an investigation as to the distribution of counseling case classification over the past five years showed some differences between the 2018–2020 distribution, classified by professional counselors, and the 2021–2022 distribution, automatically classified by TA. Therefore, this study investigated how to improve the performance of the automatic classification system using BERT, a transformer-based AI model. After fine-tuning the BERT model, which was pre-trained using patent counseling text data and professional counselor classification values data, it was observed that the BERT’s automatic classification distribution was more similar to that of professional counselors than the classification distribution of the existing TA. These results show that the future application of the “Patent Consultation Classification BERT,” a tentative name for the model, to automatic patent consultation classification may yield a better performance than the current TA method. Furthermore, if the automatic classification results become more reliable through the use of this AI model, the purpose behind the policy for the automation of this procedure—namely easing the burden and improving the efficiency of professional counselors—may be achieved with improved continuity and stability. This may then enable a more accurate identification of the current status of patent customer counseling services and customer needs.

Keywords

Intellectual property consultation, automatic classification, artificial intelligence model, BERT model, model learning

Funding

The author received financial support for this article from Korea Institute of Intellectual Property.

Conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.