Producing an Encyclopedic Dictionary using Patent Documents
Atsushi Fujii · 2008
Although the World Wide Web has of late become an important source to consult for the meaning of words, a number of technical terms related to high technology are not found on the Web.This paper describes a method to produce an encyclopedic dictionary for high-tech terms from patent information.We used a collection of unexamined patent applications published by the Japanese Patent Office as a source corpus.Given this collection, we extracted terms as headword candidates and retrieved applications including those headwords.Then, we extracted paragraph-style descriptions and categorized them into technical domains.We also extracted related terms for each headword.We have produced a dictionary including approximately 400 000 Japanese terms as headwords.We have also implemented an interface with which users can explore our dictionary by reading text descriptions and viewing a related-term graph.