Associating figures with descriptions for patent documents

Abstract

Patent document images maintained by the U.S. patent database have a specific format, in which figures and text descriptions are separated into different sections. This makes it difficult for users to refer to a figure while reading the description or vice versa. This paper introduces a method to associate figures with corresponding description paragraphs, and thus help to make patent documents more friendly for users to browse. In this method, after extracting individual figures out of the drawing section, figures and relevant descriptions are associated by evaluating the similarity between the text content of figures and description paragraphs using vector space model. Copyright 2010 ACM.