Methods for evaluating term support in patent-related documents

A method of automatically determining whether a term located in a claims section of a patent document has non-literal support in a patent-related document, the method comprising:

• receiving, from a client device, a search query;
• accessing, by a patent analyzing device, a document corpus in response to receiving the search query;
• displaying, on the client device, a list of terms appearing in a first patent-related document and a second patent-related document;
• displaying, on the client device, a graphical representation of whether individual terms in the list of terms appear in a specification of the first patent-related document or in a specification of the second patent-related document;
• upon receiving, by the client device, a selected term from the list of terms, wherein the selected term does not appear within the first patent-related document or the second patent-related document, accessing, a memory or a database of the patent analyzing device to determine a plurality of acceptable part name candidates;
• paring, by the patent analyzing device, the plurality of acceptable part name candidates into a plurality of variants based on a predetermined threshold of a frequency that the terms appear in the document corpus, the plurality of variants determined from a group consisting of using a parts index to determine synonyms of the plurality of acceptable part name candidates based on an occurrence of a plurality of part labels within the patent-related document, grouping the plurality of acceptable part name candidates into a part reference data to determine when a same last word appears in the patent-related document, and grouping the plurality of acceptable part name candidates that have the same part number;
• generating, by the patent analyzing device, one or more variant suggestions related to the selected term from the plurality of variants and transmitting the one or more variant suggestions to the client device;
• displaying, by the client device, one or more variant suggestions related to the selected term;
• receiving one or more selected variant suggestions from the one or more variant suggestions;
• associating the one or more selected variant suggestions with the selected term;
• and
• displaying, on the client device, a graphical representation of an association between the selected term and the one or more selected variant suggestions, wherein the association is indicative of non-literal support for the selected term;
• wherein the first patent related document and the second patent related document are in a same family of patent related documents.

A method of automatically determining whether a term located in a claims section of a patent document has non-literal support in a patent-related document, the method comprising:

• receiving, from a client device, a search query;
• accessing, by a patent analyzing device, a document corpus in response to receiving the search query;
• displaying, on the client device, a list of terms appearing in the patent-related document;
• displaying, on the client device, a graphical representation of a literal support status for each term within the list of terms, wherein the literal support status indicates literal support is or is not present within a specification of the patent-related document;
• upon receiving, by the client device, a selected term from the list of terms not appearing in the specification of the patent-related document, accessing a memory or a database of the patent analyzing device to determine a plurality of acceptable part name candidates;
• paring, by the patent analyzing device, the plurality of acceptable part name candidates into a plurality of variants based on a predetermined threshold of a frequency that the terms appear in the document corpus, the plurality of variants determined from a group consisting of using a parts index to determine synonyms of the plurality of acceptable part name candidates based on an occurrence of a plurality of part labels within the patent-related document, grouping the plurality of acceptable part name candidates into a part reference data to determine when a same last word appears in the patent-related document, and grouping the plurality of acceptable part name candidates that have the same part number;
• generating, by the patent analyzing device, one or more variant suggestions related to the selected term from the plurality of variants and transmitting the one or more variant suggestions to the client device;
• displaying a variant search option to search for structurally similar variant suggestions, conceptually similar variant suggestions, or both;
• displaying, by the client device, the one or more variant suggestions related to the selected term;
• receiving one or more selected variant suggestions from the one or more variant suggestions;
• associating the one or more selected variant suggestions with the selected term;
• displaying, on the client device, a graphical representation of an association between the selected term and the one or more selected variant suggestions, wherein the association is indicative of non-literal support for the selected term, and
• displaying, on the client device, a user equivalents table comprising the selected term and the one or more selected variant suggestions,
• wherein a graphical interface presents, in an integrated single display adjacent to the patent related document, the graphical representation of the literal support status for each term within the list of terms, the one or more variant suggestions, and the graphical representation of the association between the selected term and the one or more selected variant suggestions.