Finding Similar Patents through Semantic Query Expansion

Patent search is a complex task and involves a great level of expertise. Through this research we have tried to find similar patents by expanding the user query semantically. The main purpose of this research is to investigate how the patent retrieval system can be improved by using words which have same expression i.e. semantically similar. WorldNet and Wikipedia are used as an external source for expanding the query. Result shows that expanded query yields better results compared to conventional approaches of patent search.