In keeping with the U.S. Department of Commerce's strategic goals to advance U.S. innovation and global competitiveness, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) recently added new artificial intelligence-based (AI) "Similarity Search" feature. This new tool will further assist patent examiners in searching prior art during the examination process, thereby supporting the USPTO to more efficiently search for comparative documents in patent examination work.
The similarity search function can be used for examiners to receive selected patent application information, including instructions, etc., and can input and use and train AI to output a similar list of domestic applications and foreign applications. Examiners can use Cooperative Patent Classification and text fragment selection to improve AI-based similarity search queries.
