Abstract. We propose a document signature approach to patent classification. Automatic patent classification is a challenging task because of the fast growing number of patent applications filed every year and the complexity, size and nested hierarchical structure of patent taxonomies. In our proposal, the classification of a target patent is achieved through a k-nearest neighbour search using Hamming distance on signatures generated from patents; the classification labels of the retrieved patents are weighted and combined to produce a patent classification code for the target patent. The use of this method is motivated by the fact that, intuitively, document signatures are more efficient than previous approaches for this task that considered the training of classifiers on the whole vocabulary feature set. Our empirical experiments also demonstrate that the combination of document signatures and k-nearest neighbours search improves classification effectiveness, provided that enough data is used to generate signatures.

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