Good post. Keep ‘em coming.

Stephen Arnold, September 17, 2008

Just because you patent something doesn’t mean you use it. Or even that you have the rights to use it (it may depend on another patent which you don’t own). We patented stuff all the time at Bell Labs that never saw the light of production. The patent attorneys told us researchers that they wanted a “mine field” of patents to trap anyone entering into the speech or language processing space.

As with most patents, the claims in US20070198481 are like an onion, layering well-known techniques with patent-speak jargon. I work in this area and don’t see anything new in the claims, which is typical of patents in my area.

Our Phase II SBIR from the U.S. National Institutes of Health is in this same area — extracting facts and linking them to databases. You’ll see similar patents out of IBM, BBN, SRI, PowerSet and Microsoft (I really like Silviu Cucerzan and Eric Brill’s work in this direction; it’ll make you wonder why MS bought PowerSet). You also see whole companies, like Spock.com, built around this technology or something very much like it. The U.S. National Institute of Standards just ran its 2008 Automatic Content Extraction evals (ACE), which is essentially a bakeoff format for this kind of fact extraction and object linking technology; here are results from ACE 2007.