This paper presents a method for extracting technical information from a patent pool. It was
designed to support the construction of the state of the art of a technology or a
product/process by automatically identifying the list of problems that the inventors have
faced. The method is based on a strict ontology, which defines what a patent problem is, and
a set of IR strategies, which identify all alternative ways adopted in the pool to describe
problems. More in detail, the authors propose a set of syntactic dependency patterns, and …