Patentee Name Harmonisation - ecoom.be

An inspection of Table 3 reveals that, in several cases, names cannot be assumed to
refer to one and the same patentee automatically (e.g. “AG INTERNATIONAL”, “AH
INTERNATIONAL” and “AL INTERNATIONAL”, or “APPLIED GENERICS” and “APPLIED
GENETICS”). In other words, approximate string searching is very powerful in identifying
potential matches but does not result in conclusive findings. The difference with the former
example in Table 2 is the presence of proper names. Approximate string searching is conclusive
when identifying spelling variations of common words, but far less conclusive in the case of
proper names. Without additional validation efforts, the number of mismatches can be
considerable. This problem will be more marked, the shorter the length of strings being
assessed. This lack of accuracy precludes the adoption of approximate string searching in an
automated manner. This issue might be addressed by using address information as discussed in
section 6.3 - Introducing address information (in conjunction with name similarity) 13 .
6.2 Automatic acronym generation
As mentioned in the introduction, the presence and use of acronyms and abbreviations
result in an increase in name variations. To deal with acronyms, an automated method of
generating acronyms for company names that consist of different parts might be considered.
These generated acronyms can be matched with acronyms already present in the list of
patentee names. When a match is found, one could consider harmonizing both names. This,
however, requires the generated acronyms to be unambiguously related to an acronym already
present. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case as the following experiment illustrates.
Acronyms have been generated automatically, beginning with a test set of names
consisting of different parts (containing at least one space). The name after its legal form
indication had been removed was used as the starting point. All non-letter (A-Z) and non-digit
(0-9) characters were replaced with a space (“ “), resulting in a string of words separated by
spaces. An acronym was generated taking the first character of every word. These acronyms
can be linked back to the cleaned names to see if automatically generated acronyms match
acronyms already present in the name list.
Table 4 and Table 5 contain all names in the test set for which the automatic created
acronym resulted in “IBM” and “ICC” respectively.
Table 4: Names with automatically generated acronym "IBM"
AUTOMATICALLY
GENERATED
ACRONYM
ORIGINAL NAME
IBM IBM BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM IINTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INDUSTRIEANLAGEN BETRIEBSGESELLSCHAFT MBH
IBM INDUSTRIEANLAGEN-BETRIEBSGESELLSCHAFT MBH
IBM INDUSTRIEANLAGEN-BETRIEBTGESELLSCHAFT MBH
IBM INERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INFORMATION BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTELLECTUAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTENATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTERANATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTERANTIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTERNAIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTERNAITONAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTERNAL BUSINESS MACHINE
IBM INTERNATIAONAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTERNATIIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTERNATINAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTERNATIOAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTERNATIOANAL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTERNATIOANL BUSINESS MACHINES
IBM INTERNATIOINAL BUSINESS MACHINES
13 For example, according to EPO applicant information, “APPLIED GENERICS” is always situated in Biggar,
GB, while “APPLIED GENETICS” is always situated in Freeport, US, suggesting two different companies.
13