Patent Analysis with Text Mining for TRIZ*
Yanhong Liang , Runhua Tan, Jianhong Ma
Institute of Design for Innovation, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, P.R. China
Abstract - Patent is an important knowledge source for
industrial research and product development on account of
its innovation and practicability. In TRIZ theory, a product
design problem can be considered as one or more
Contradictions. But the Contradictions and corresponding
Inventive Principles are rather abstract and general. It will
be more helpful for innovators to solve the problem if they
obtain related examples from published patents that have
solved the Contradictions. In order to search the relevant
patens according to Contradictions and Inventive Principles
automatically, text mining is used to analyze patent
documents. In this paper, a computer-aided methodology to
classify patents according to Contradictions and Inventive
Principles is proposed.
Keywords - Contradiction, Inventive Principle, TRIZ,
patent analysis，text mining
I. INTRODUCTION
Information hidden in patents can provide precious
sources for technological-scientific innovation, such as
the invention tool--TRIZ, which is originated from
studying patents. Under analysis of millions of successful
patents TRIZ has created as a generic problem-solving
tool that encapsulates knowledge, strategies and best
practices of the most creative and innovative thinkers of
our times.
Altshuller, the father of TRIZ, recognized that the
place where to look for the basics of innovation and new
ideas was not in the brains of inventors, but in the
published inventions [1]. In product innovation the fact is
that the problem we are trying to solve may have already
been solved by someone else. That is to say, what we
normally need to do is to compromise. According to
TRIZ, a significant operation of product innovation is to
solve design contradictions. When Contradictions and
Inventive Principles are defined, the product can be
developed by referring to the analogous inventions not
only in related fields but also in other fields that have
solved the same Contradictions previously.
Patent has many key technologies for industrial
research and product development on account of its
innovation and practicability. In recent years, patent
analysis [2, 3, 4, 5] is more highlighted in high-
technology management as the process of innovation
becomes more complex, the cycle of innovation becomes
shorter and the market demand becomes more volatile.
* yanhong Liang thanks sponsors of Scientific Research
Program of Hebei and Ph.D. Programs Foundation of Ministry
of Education of China
978-1-4244-2330-9/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE
To obtain useful information, the method by scanning
or reading the indexed patent documents from long lists of
noisy results, is a rather trivial and time-consuming task
that requires a careful manual selection. And the defects
of extract information from patent documents, which
indexed by standard keyword-based search methods, will
ignore relevant solvable schemes and enlightenment in
other fields. Especially in using TRIZ, patent searched
based on keyword or international patent classification
(IPC) is not enough, because patents that have solved
same Contradictions and have used same Inventive
Principles may come from different fields. Thus, the
automatic method to classify patents for TRIZ user is in
great demand. A very well suitable method to solve this
difficult problem is text mining. Text mining, which
specialized for text formatting, is applied to derive
information from patents.
In this paper, we first introduce TRIZ, mainly focused
on Inventive Principles, Contradictions, TRIZ process to
solve problems, and insufficiency of systematic
innovation software. Then patent analysis at the present
time is reviewed. Following that a proposed methodology
of mining patents according to Contradictions and
Inventive Principles is provided. Finally future research is
presented. Our focus, however, would be largely directed
towards the approach to classify patents according to
Contradictions and Inventive Principles.
II. TRIZ: A TOOL FOR CREATIVITY AND
INNOVATION
TRIZ is the Russian acronym that means Theory of
Inventive Problem Solving [1]. Unlike the spontaneous
and intuitive creativity of individuals or groups, it is a
knowledge-based technology for generating new concepts
and ideas. It involves a series of tools, methods and
strategies. TRIZ began in 1946 when scientist G.S.
Altshuller and his colleagues in the former U.S.S.R.
discovered that an invention or a problem solving is not a
random process, but rather is governed by certain
objective laws. In reviewing thousands of excellent
patents in different fields, Altshuller realized that all
innovations emerge from a small number of Inventive
Principles and most difficult problems in engineering
involve fundamental Contradictions.
In TRIZ theory Contradictions are characterized by a
desire to improve one aspect of a system following
another property declined in performance or value. By
analyzing the ways of solving and eliminating the
Contradictions, Altshuller discovered that only a limited
number of Inventive Principles were used to solve or
1147
 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE ICMIT
eliminate Contradictions in analyzing many thousands of
breakthrough inventions, irrespective of the patents’ field
(e.g., aerospace and agriculture). He categorized these
Inventive Principles in several retrievable forms,
including a Contradiction table, 40 Inventive Principles,
and 76 Standard Solutions [1], which allows instant
access to the strategies and principles used in these highly
successful designs. These generic Inventive Principles can
be applied to all areas of technology, greatly reducing
time to produce breakthrough ideas and inventions.
A. TRIZ Process to Solve Problems
In the course of solving any technical problem, one
tool or many can be used. The 40 Inventive Principles of
Problem Solving are the most accessible "tool" of TRIZ.
According to TRIZ, when we have a problem, process, or
product that appears to have a contradiction in its design
or operation, the same Contradiction has been faced, and
solved with the same Inventive Principles before, by
people in other industries or technologies, i.e., “someone
somewhere has already solved a problem like yours”.
Using TRIZ, the engineering problem is solved through
four steps as shown in Fig.1.
Step 1 is to analyze the specific problem being
encountered. Step 2 is to formulate the problem in terms
of physical Contradictions using TRIZ language. Could
the improvement of one technical characteristic to solve
the problem cause other technical characteristics to
worsen? Step 3 is to search for Inventive Principles to
solve the Contradictions from the Contradiction table.
Step 4 is to look for analogous solutions to adapt to the
specific solution. In step 3, the Inventive Principles are
hints that will help innovators find possible solution to the
problem; however the Inventive Principles are rather
abstract and general, it will be more helpful for innovators
to solve the specific problem if they obtain related
examples from previous analogous solutions about how
former inventors have solved the Contradictions with the
corresponding Inventive Principles. The relevant patents
have described the inventions in details, which make
possible to produce creativity to solve the facing
Contradiction, especially in other areas. Therefore, patent
classification according to Inventive Principles associated
with the related Contradictions can provide quite helpful
references to the innovators.
Fig.1. the General Model for Problem Solving with TRIZ [6]
1148
B. Systematic Innovation Software
Because TRIZ is built on a database of hundreds of
thousands of patents, Inventive Principles and
Contradictions, etc., some software has been developed to
provide the corresponding Inventive Principles with the
outlines and illuminations to be displayed quickly in
friendly formats when Contradictions of the specific
problem are defined. Many companies are engaged in
developing computer aided innovation software with
TRIZ as the core. Currently popular software includes
Pro/Innovator [7], Goldfire Innovator [8] and
TechOptimizer [9], etc. And Hebei University of
Technology has developed InventionTool 2.0. The
software acts as catalyst for creativity and problem
solving. But Inventive Principles and the corresponding
illuminations are rather abstract and there are different
ways to use every Inventive Principles, it is more helpful
for innovators to obtain related examples from published
patents that have solved the Contradictions.
Through the proposed software innovators can
acquire Contradictions and Inventive Principles, just as
step 2 and step 3 have mentioned above. After innovators
have a Contradiction, next what they are interested in is
the feasible solution. It is more helpful to inspire
innovators if they are provided specific examples about
how someone else has solved the analogous
Contradiction. This process is on contrasted to the process
of TRIZ generation partly.
So far there is no open patent database available with
sufficient examples classified by Inventive Principles and
Contradictions [10]. One reason is that it consumes great
time and man-power to manually classify patents. Since
patent documents are in a large amount and they are
increasing every day. For such classification, a huge
number of patents have to be analyzed in their contents.
We simply don't have time to follow all the worldwide
patents manually. Patents classified to this purpose
automatically or semi-automatically will save much time
and efforts. Therefore a method to classify patents
automatically according to Inventive Principles and
Contradictions for TRIZ users and TRIZ software
developers is in great demand.
III. PATENT ANALYSIS
Patent documents contain important research results
that are valuable to the process of product innovation. A
patent is a legal title granting its holder the right to
prevent third parties from commercially exploiting an
invention without authorizations [11]. An invention can
belong to any field of technology. It has been indicated by
the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that
patent publications cover approximately 90%-95% of the
scientific research results worldwide, greater than the
percentage that all scientific journals cover, and probably
70% of patent publications have never been published in
other non-patent literature. Now most patents can be
 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE ICMIT
obtained freely on Internet. That people often consult
patents in scientific research not only can improve
research point and level of the research item, but also can
save almost 60% of the time and 40% of the cost. In
recent years patent analysis has been recognized as an
import task for product development.
The technologies and schemes implemented for
patent are described in its claim and description and so on.
Because natural language is complex and multiplicity, it is
difficult to handle a patent document on computer. The
traditional method of extracting knowledge from patents
was based on manual analysis carried out from experts.
However patent documents are often lengthy and rich in
technical and legal terminology and thus hard to read and
analyze for non-specialists. It is a time consuming and
labor-intensive task, such as the theory of TRIZ is
developed by over 1500 person-years of research studying
over two million of the world’s most successful patents
[12]. Nowadays the traditional method is impractical as
patent database grow exponentially.
Patent analysis technologies include patent
bibiometric data analysis [13], patent citation analysis
[14], patent statistical analysis [15], patent classification,
and so on. Bibliometric analysis of patents provides
information on the growth of the inventive activity and
technological trends. Patent citation analysis is usually
used to measure the quality of patents on the examination
of citation links between patents and scientific literature.
Patent statistical analysis is to apply statistical indictors of
feature words to express patent information by word
analysis. Patent classification is used to arrange and index
the technical content of patent specifications so that a
document disclosing the invention identical or similar to
the invention for which a patent is claimed can be quickly
found.
In addition more and more patent analysts have
increased their interests in discovering and exploring
information hidden in patents related to technological
activities and innovation. The natural language of patent
is analyzed with computer. For example, Cascini provided
a Subject-Action-Object model to extract useful
information [16]. Byungun proposed a text-mining-based
patent network method [3]. Although clustering and
finding the relationship of similar contents between
patents can extract useful information from huge sets of
patent documents, for the time being the defects of these
methods are lack of semantic analysis and the results of
analysis are difficult to put into practice for inventors
using TRIZ. For TRIZ users, patents are required to be
classified by the Contradictions and Inventive Principles.
Currently popular patent classification schemes are
used to organize and index the technical content of patent
specifications so that specifications on a specific topic or
in a given area of technology can be identified easily and
accurately. Before their publication, patent documents are
given one or more classification codes based on their
textual contents for topic-based analysis and retrieval.
Many patent classification schemes, such as IPC
(International Patent Classification), US Classification
1149
and British Classification, have been developed.
However, the classification schemes used by these
researchers according to the technical fields are not
suitable for TRIZ users.
Patent documents are divided into different areas
according to technology fields, which is helpful to search
the prior art for traditional inventors. However, it is
inadequate for TRIZ users since TRIZ users are interested
in previous patents that have solved the same
Contradiction and used the same Inventive Principles,
which may come from different fields [10, 17]. Patent
documents, which are classified according to
Contradictions, will provide a broader view for TRIZ
users and TRIZ software developers, by helping them find
possible inspiration from the field that may be totally
different from others.
IV. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY OF MINING
PATENTS ACCORDING TO CONTRADICTIONS
A. Framework for Patent Analysis
Since the original patent documents are expressed in
natural language format, text mining, as a technique to
perform knowledge discovery from collections of
unstructured text, is used to extract useful information
from huge sets of patents. The overall process of patent
analysis with text mining for TRIZ is made up of several
steps. First of all, full patent documents to be analyzed are
collected in electronic text format. This may involve a
repeated process of devising a set of query terms,
searching a couple of patent databases, filtering undesired
patents, and downloading patents for local analysis.
People can fetch all patents under some IPC categories,
keywords, and/or within some year limits, etc. Many
patent offices already allow people to download abstracts
and completed texts of their patents freely, such as the
USPTO from United States, the EPO from Europe. In
particular, http://ep.espacenet.com/, the download service
of the European Patent Office has become a very popular
source of information.
Second, raw patent documents are transformed into
structured data. Since the original documents are
expressed in natural language format, they must be
transformed raw data into structured data in order to be
analyzed and utilized. These patent documents are
segmented into bag-of-words, and then stop words are
filtered from the bag-of-words to reduce the dimension.
Semantic characteristic and word sense disambiguation
are carried out. The prior patent documents and the
corresponding Contradictions and Inventive Principles are
samples of training text collections. A text mining
methodology specialized for patent analysis for TRIZ is
proposed and shown in Fig. 2. In relation to patent
analysis, text mining is used as a data processing and
information-extracting tool. Then, the patents to be
analyzed are classified according to Contradictions and
Inventive Principles.
 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE ICMIT
Fig.2. Steps in patent analysis for TRIZ
B. Data Preprocessing
1) Bag-of-words Representation
For mining large patent collections it is necessary to
preprocess the patent documents and store the information
in data structure, which is more appropriate for further
processing than a plain text file. Since a patent document
is described based on words, that is to say it is composed
of a set of words. A patent document can be represented
on a word level (bag-of-words representation). A patent
document is preprocessed by removing all punctuation
marks, tabs and other non-text characters. And after
splitting the text by white space and removing
punctuations, a stream of words will be obtained. This
tokenization representation is then used for further
processing. The set of different words obtained by
merging all patent documents is called a patent-document
collection.
2) Filtering and Lemmatization, Stemming
In order to reduce size of the bag and dimension of
the description of patent document in the collection, the
set of words of the patent documents can be reduced by
filtering and lemmatization.
Filtering is to remove words from the collection, i.e.
from the document. Term frequency (TF) and inverse
document frequency (IDF) are two parameters used in
filtering words. Low TF and DF words are often removed
in indexing of a collection. However, using them alone
does not prevent undesired words such as function words
from being calculated. So stop words filtering is added. In
the view of non-linguistics stop-words are those words
that carry little or no information, like articles,
conjunctions, prepositions, etc. They mainly act as
1150
functional roles. For example, a, about, above, about,
across, after, afterwards, again, against, all, almost, alone,
almost, alone, along, already, also, etc. Furthermore,
words that occur extremely often can be said to be of little
information content to distinguish between documents.
Also, words that occur very seldom are likely to be of no
particular statistical relevancy and can be removed [12].
Different forms of the same words are usually
problematic for text data analysis, because they have
different spellings and similar meanings (e.g. learns,
learned, learning). So lemmatization and stemming are
applied. Lemmatization is a process of finding the
normalized form of a word, i.e. removing suffixes.
Generally speaking, it transforms verb forms to the
infinite tense and nouns to the singular form. Words with
a common stem will usually have similar meanings, for
instance, the word works, worked, working. Frequently,
the words are conflated into a single word work by
removal of the various suffixes –s, -ed, -ing. In addition,
the suffix stripping process will reduce the total number
of words, and hence reduce the size and complexity of the
data in the collection. Stemming is a process of
transforming a word into its stem which is the normalized
form. It is similar to lemmatization that stemming does
not require to replace the suffix of a word but to extract
basic forms of the words, i.e., to strip the plural s from
nouns, -ing from verbs, or other affixes. A lot of work
has been carried out in word lemmatization and
stemming, just as the well-known porter’s algorithm [18].
3) Patent Analysis based on Semantic Characteristic
It is inadequate to the simple bag-of-words with Term
Frequency and Vector Space Model for patent analysis,
because word sense is ambiguous in natural language
processing (NLP). This phenomenon is ubiquitous that
words often have more than one meaning, sometimes the
meanings of word fairly similar and sometimes
completely different. Without disambiguation the
accuracy of patent classification will be influenced. And
the description of TRIZ Contradictions and Inventive
Principles are abstract and general, so patents searched
only according to the literal words are usually not
appropriate. WordNet [19] gives a word multiple senses
which are helpful to connect other words in the text.
Whenever the designer has a problem in product
development, he would search for inventive experience
and information to enlighten his thinking. However, this
search is not an easy process to TRIZ user. A keyword
search is helpful to the innovator but sometimes the useful
patents maybe be neglected since the same Inventive
Principles being used to solve the problem come from
patent documents in different fields. Therefore there is
required to return records accurately, that might solve
analogous problems for innovators.
Under these circumstances, the prior patent
documents corresponding to Contradictions and Inventive
Principles are samples to produce training text collections.
In the phase of training, the training patents is
 Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE ICMIT
preprocessed by removing stop words, filtering words and
stemming, then semantic analysis is performed by
WordNet. On the basis of WordNet, word is substituted
by word sense collection, which becomes characteristic
items of the document eigenvector. Then using latent
semantic indexing model, the dimension of document
vector space is dropped by MATLAB. Finally the
structured data can be stored to .arff or .csv format, which
is appropriate to classify the patents using WEKA
software [20].
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
Classified patents according to Contradictions and
Inventive Principles can help innovators using TRIZ to
solve the specific problem. Currently, however, we are
lacking open databases with sufficient classified patents
of this kind partly because of the huge manpower
requirement of manual classification. With a wider
application of TRIZ and enormous increase of patents
worldwide, there is an urgent need to automatically
classify patents for TRIZ users. The main purpose of this
paper is to propose a computer-aided approach for
classifying patents in TRIZ categories.
In this paper, a methodology based text mining that
could be used to analyze patent documents for TRIZ user
is presented. The prior patent documents corresponding to
Contradictions and Inventive Principles are taken as
samples to produce training text collections. And because
the descriptions of TRIZ Contradictions and Inventive
Principles are rather abstract and general, and patents
searched only according to the literal words are usually
not appropriate. The knowledge of semantic structure can
be obtained from WordNet. With the trained model,
patents will be classified to Contradictions and Inventive
Principles using WEKA software. The corresponding
patents obtained will accelerate the search for
breakthrough solutions and give users ability to reach far
greater level of product performance. Besides, in practice,
an engineering problem often involves more than one
Contradiction and needs several Inventive Principles. The
difficulty is how to amalgamate the solutions of each
Contradiction.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The research is supported in part by Scientific Research
Program of Hebei under Grant Numbers 07215602D-2 and
Ph.D. Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China
under Grant Numbers 20060080002.
REFERENCES
[1] R. H. Tan, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving: TRIZ.
China: Science Press, 2004.
1151
[2] V. W. Soo, S. Y. Lin, S. Y. Yang, S. N. Lin, S. L. Cheng,
“A cooperative multi-agent platform for invention based on
patent document analysis and ontology”, Expert Systems
with Applications, vol. 31, issue 4, pp.766-775, Nov. 2006.
[3] B. Yoon, Y. Park, “A text-mining-based patent network:
Analytical tool for high-technology trend”, The Journal of
High Technology Management Research, vol. 15, issue 1,
pp. 37-50, Feb. 2004.
[4] G. Fischer, N. Lalyre, “Analysis and visualization with host-
® ™
based software-The features of STN AnaVist ”, World
Patent Information, vol. 28, issue 4, pp.312-318, 2006.
[5] Y. H. Tseng, C. J. Lin, Y. L. Lin, “Text mining techniques
for patent analysis”, Information Processing and
Management, vol.43, issue 5, pp. 1216-1247, Sep. 2007.
[6] TRIZ, Available from: http://www.triz-journal.com/
archives/what_is_triz/: 2007/05/10.
[7] Pro/Innovator, Available from: http://www.iwint.com.cn/:
2007/06/24
[8] Goldfire, Available from: http://www.goldfire.com/:
2008/02/10
[9] TechOptimizer, Available from :http://www.invention-
machine.com/: 2008/02/24.
[10] H. T. Loh, C. He, L. X. Shen, “Automatic classification of
patent document for TRIZ users”, World Patent
Information, vol. 28, issue 1, pp. 6-13, Mar. 2006.
[11] Patent, Available from: http://www.epo.org/patents/Grant
-procedure/About-patents.html: 2008/01/13
[12] R. H. Tan, Innovative design-TRIZ: theory of Inventive
Problem Solving: TRIZ, China Machine Press, China, 2002
[13] V. K. Gupta, N. B. Pangannaya, “Carbon nanotubes:
bibliometric analysis of patents”, World Patent Information,
vol.22, issue 3, pp185-189, Sep. 2000.
[14] J. Michel, B. Bettels, “Patent citation analysis: a closer
look at the basic input data from patent search reports”,
Scientometrics, vol. 51, no. 1 pp185–201, 2001
[15] Y. H. Tseng, C. J. Lin, Y. I. Lin, “Text mining for patent
map analysis”. Information Processing & Management, vol.
43, issue 5, pp1216-1247, Sep. 2007.
[16] G. Cascini, D. Russo, “Computer-aided analysis of patents
and search for TRIZ contradictions”, Int. J. Product
Development, vol.4, no. 1/2, 2007
[17] C. He, H. T. Loh, “Grouping of TRIZ Inventive Principles
to facilitate automatic patent classification”, Expert System
with Applications, vol.34, issue 1, pp 788-795, Jan. 2008.
[18] M. F. Porter, “An algorithm for suffix stripping”,
Program, vol.14, no.3, pp130-137, 1980
[19] C. Fellbaum, WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database,
Language, Speech, and Communication, The MIT Press,
Cambridge, May,1998.
[20] WEKA, Avaliable from: http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz
/ml/weak/: 2008/01/08.