In this paper we analyze a highly professional search setting of patent examiners of the United Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). We gain insight into the search behavior of USPTO patent examiners to explore ways for enhancing query generation in patent searching. We show that query generation is highly patent domain specific and patent examiners follow a strict scheme for generating text queries. Means to enhance query generation in patent search are to suggest synonyms and equivalents, co-occurring terms and keyword phrases to the searchable features of the invention. Further, we show that term networks including synonyms and equivalents can be learned from the query logs for automatic query expansion in patent searching.
An analysis of real query sessions of patent examiners has shown that about 60% of the used expansion terms (ETs) are synonyms and equivalents REF .