Product description in terms of advantages and drawbacks: Exploiting patent information in novel ways

Patents are an enormous source of valuable information. Unfortunately only a limited number of elements are targeted in them (mainly legal) and most of the design knowledge is lost or not exploited. Advantages and drawbacks belong to such a group. The paper presents a method to automatically extract advantages and drawbacks from patent texts and proposes a classification framework to organize the gathered knowledge. The organization of advantages and drawbacks follows the evolution of energy material and signal flows, typical of the functional analysis, and allows to organize them in structured documents where the designer can find useful triggers to avoid failures or hints to conceive a more appealing product.