Abstract
In the highly competitive business environment, companies use patents as the intellectual asset to gain strategic competiveness. Patent prior art retrieval is a nontrivial task for invalidity and patentability search, which could help enterprises to plan their R&D strategies, patent portfolio, and avoid patent infringement issues in the future. This study adopts an efficient and effective hybrid patent prior art retrieval approach using claim structure and patent description to enhance prior art retrieval performance in terms of recall rate and exam the robustness through performing experiments in a large dataset. We obtained the best result by combining the information of claim structure and top 70 % sentences in description. We have achieved the competitive result in terms of raising the recall rate with the proposed hybrid approach, which also demonstrated the usefulness of including claim structure into patent prior art retrieval system.