Research on patent classification based on hierarchical label semantics

Patent classification is an essential task in patent information management and knowledge mining. Most existing studies are based on the textual content of individual patent texts (e.g., titles and abstracts) for classification, but the patent also has label information with hierarchical structure and semantic description. However, the semantics correlation of patent texts and their labels have been largely ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called HLSPC for patent classification by leveraging the hierarchical semantics correlation of patent texts and their labels. Specifically, we first apply a patent representation learning module for capturing the semantics representation of patent texts and hierarchical labels. Then, we design a label attention learning module to build the semantics correlation between patent texts and hierarchical labels, which enhances patent representation. Finally, we deploy a multi-level fusion module to get the refined category prediction for each patent which can preserve both local and global hierarchical prediction information. Extensive experimental results on two English patent datasets demonstrate the effective power of the HLSPC model.