The wave of big data has overtaken the world, changing people’s lives, work and way of thinking. The impact of big data on the internet has been immense, especially following the substantial increases in internet speeds, which ushered in an explosive growth of data. An increasing number of countries are recognizing the importance of data at the strategy level, China among them. Big data companies are releasing technologies on public opinion analysis, automatic digests, internet searches, machine translations, smart responses and others, responding to the data needs of the public. A closely related big data technology segment is Natural Language Processing (NLP).

    Considering the importance of NLP, an intellectual property bureau entrusted Kangxin to conduct analysis on NLP patents to better understand the current state of NLP technology. To determine the direction in which to take NLP research, we combined background information on foreign and domestic big data, analyzed patents from technological development, application and other aspects, and identified gaps and hot topics in the industry.

    In the process of patent analysis, we retrieved, filtered and indexed NLP patents to assess the global state of the technology. We then analyzed it from a technical standpoint, from research of language data basics to word, sentence and text processing. We then analyzed the role of NLP technology in practical use, like public opinion analysis, automated digests, machine translations and others. We then analyzed combined foreign and domestic patent layout R&D specifics to make informed recommendations to our client