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The 2023 update to the Artificial Intelligence Patent Dataset (AIPD) extends the original AIPD to all United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent documents (i.e., patents and pre-grant publications, or PGPubs) published through 2023, while incorporating an improved patent landscaping methodology to identify AI within patents and PGPubs. This new approach substitutes BERT for Patents for the Word2Vec embeddings used previously, and uses active learning to incorporate additional training data closer to the “decision boundary” between AI and not-AI to help improve predictions. We show that this new approach achieves substantially better performance than the original methodology on a set of patent documents where the two methods disagreed—on this set, the AIPD 2023 achieved precision of 68.18 percent and recall of 78.95 percent, while the original AIPD achieved 50 percent and 21.05 percent, respectively. To help researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers better understand the determinants and impacts of AI invention, we have made the AIPD 2023 publicly available on the USPTO’s economic research web page.
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Partisan patent examiners? Exploring the link between the political ideology of patent examiners and patent office outcomes
Patents are key strategic resources which enable firms to appropriate innovation returns and prevent rival imitation. Patent examiners – individuals who may be subject to various sources of bias – play a central role in determining which inventions are awarded patent rights. Using a novel dataset, we explore if one increasingly prevalent source of bias – political ideology – manifests in examiner decision-making. Reassuringly, our analysis suggests that the political ideology of patent examiners is largely unrelated to patent office outcomes. However, we do find evidence suggesting politically active conservative-leaning examiners are more likely to grant patents relative to politically active liberal-leaning examiners, but only for patent applications where there is ambiguity regarding what constitutes patentable subject matter and hence examiners have greater discretion.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2244885
- PAR ID:
- 10488738
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Research Policy
- Volume:
- 52
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 0048-7333
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 104853
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2023.104853
