Patent classification

Patent reviewers usually are responsible to classify the patent applications, i.e., they assign the design codes. This is time-consuming due to the numerous classification codes. For instance, the U.S. design patent system has 33 classes which are further divided into subclasses. Given that design patents include both titles and visual content, the goal of the experiment is patent classification by integrating titles, captions, and images. Although a single design patent can be associated with multiple design codes, we focus on the primary classification—solving the task as a multi-class classification problem.