Patentee Name Harmonisation - ecoom.be

Table of contents
1 Introduction................................................................................................................................. 1
2 Patentee name harmonization and legal entity harmonization .................................................. 2
3 Existing name-harmonization approaches ................................................................................. 3
3.1 USPTO CONAME assignee name harmonization................................................................. 3
3.2 DERWENT WPI company name harmonization.................................................................... 4
4 A content-driven name harmonization approach focusing on accuracy .................................... 5
4.1 Data pre-processing............................................................................................................... 6
4.2 Name cleaning ....................................................................................................................... 7
5 Results and Impact..................................................................................................................... 8
6 Directions for further development ........................................................................................... 10
6.1 Approximate string searching............................................................................................... 10
6.2 Automatic acronym generation ............................................................................................ 13
6.3 Introducing address information (in conjunction with name similarity) ................................ 15
7 CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................................... 16
8 References ............................................................................................................................... 17
APPENDIX 1: STEP-BY-STEP METHODOLOGY AND APPLICATION USING EPO AND USPTO
PATENTEE NAMES.............................................................................................................................. 18
1 Data pre-processing ................................................................................................................. 18
1.1 Character cleaning ............................................................................................................... 18
1.2 Punctuation cleaning (pre-parsing) ...................................................................................... 22
2 Name cleaning.......................................................................................................................... 28
2.1 Legal form indication treatment............................................................................................ 28
2.2 Common company word removal ........................................................................................ 35
2.3 Spelling variation harmonization .......................................................................................... 37
2.4 Condensing .......................................................................................................................... 38
2.5 Umlaut harmonization .......................................................................................................... 39
2.6 Cleaned name...................................................................................................................... 40
3 Harmonization results............................................................................................................... 42
3.1 Original names matched to harmonized names .................................................................. 42
3.2 Additional patents assigned to harmonized names ............................................................. 44
3.3 Patent distribution amongst patentees................................................................................. 46
3.4 Patent ranking of patentees ................................................................................................. 47
APPENDIX 2: ALL SEARCH AND REPLACE STATEMENTS FOR ALL LEGAL FORMS TO BE
REMOVED AT THE END OF A NAME ................................................................................................. 51
APPENDIX 3: TOP 200 OCCURRING LAST WORDS......................................................................... 69
APPENDIX 4: TOP 200 OCCURRING FIRST WORDS ....................................................................... 71
APPENDIX 5: TOP 200 PATENTEES BEFORE NAME CLEANING AND HARMONIZATION ........... 73
APPENDIX 6: TOP 200 PATENTEES AFTER NAMe CLEANING AND HARMONIZATION............... 77
APPENDIX 7: VALIDATION EXERCICE ON 35 HARMONIZED NAMES............................................ 81