P³L: Patent Prediction With Prompt Learning

Patents are crucial for protecting technological innovations and fostering competitive advancements in industry. Patent prediction, a novel task in the field of patent mining, aims to forecast future technological trends, providing valuable insights for strategic planning and innovation in the industry. However, the complexity of patent data and the diversity of technological fields make effective patent prediction a significant challenge. Existing methods for predicting scientific research trends struggle to effectively model patent structures and capture dependencies between patents, resulting in suboptimal patent trend predictions. In this article, we propose a novel method, patent prediction with prompt learning (P³L), to achieve effective and accurate prediction of future patent developments based on a pretrained language model (PLM). P³L includes a patent similarity path extraction module to extract multiple patent development paths from extensive datasets. Following this, we design a patent prompt learning approach that integrates patent development paths, keywords, and patent similarities into the prompts. To mitigate potential noise introduced by this integration, we introduce an attention mask matrix for prompt denoising. Finally, we introduce three patent datasets with rich structures, and conduct extensive experiments on these datasets as well as a public dataset, demonstrating the superiority of the proposed method. The dataset and code have been made publicly available at https://github.com/AllminerLab/P3L.