PatentMind: A Multi-Aspect Reasoning Graph for Patent Similarity Evaluation

TL;DR

PatentMind introduces a multi-aspect reasoning graph framework for patent similarity evaluation, effectively capturing technical, legal, and application dimensions to emulate expert judgment and outperform existing models.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel Multi-Aspect Reasoning Graph (MARG) framework that decomposes patents into multiple dimensions and dynamically weights similarity scores based on context, improving accuracy.

Findings

Strong correlation (r=0.938) with expert annotations

Outperforms embedding-based and patent-specific models

Provides a structured foundation for patent decision-making

Abstract

Patent similarity evaluation plays a critical role in intellectual property analysis. However, existing methods often overlook the intricate structure of patent documents, which integrate technical specifications, legal boundaries, and application contexts. We introduce PatentMind, a novel framework for patent similarity assessment based on a Multi-Aspect Reasoning Graph (MARG). PatentMind decomposes patents into their three dimensions of technical features, application domains, and claim scopes, then dimension-specific similarity scores are calculated over the MARG. These scores are dynamically weighted through a context-aware reasoning process, which integrates contextual signals to emulate expert-level judgment. To support evaluation, we construct a human-annotated benchmark PatentSimBench, comprising 500 patent pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that the PatentMind-generated scores show a strong correlation ($r=0.938$) with expert annotations, significantly outperforming embedding-based models, patent-specific models, and advanced prompt engineering methods. Beyond computational linguistics, our framework provides a structured and semantically grounded foundation for real-world decision-making, particularly for tasks such as infringement risk assessment, underscoring its broader impact on both patent analytics and evaluation.