檢索相關專利在現今產品生命週期中扮演非常重要的角色。如果一位產品經理(PM)可以快速且正確無誤地檢索出產品相關專利，他就能有效率地判斷該項產品是否具有競爭優勢，另一方面也可知道，競爭對手產品是否與我們所推產品是否有專利上面的衝突，更重要的是在研發之初進行相關專利檢索可以避免因為侵權訴訟而導致的無形和有形資產損失。但是由於專利不但在數量上快速地成長，也越來越複雜。所以這此研究中我們提供另一種以專利申請範圍的結構為主的方式來協助更精準地檢索龐大的專利資料庫。
目前大部分專利檢索是單純利用關鍵字去搜尋和比對專利，但是這種方式往往會忽略專利發明本身的結構。故此研究利用專利申請範圍的敘述找出發明元件的架構，並用發明元件連線的關係來比對專利的相似程度。所以，我們將以傳統文字探勘技術先建構較可能的且較大潛在相關專利的集合，再利用本篇研究所改進的解析專利申請範圍的技術，再此集合中真正找到最核心且最多最相關的專利文件。
最後本篇研究貢獻在於可減少公司內人員(可能是PM)在開發新產品時，所需花費搜尋專利的負擔，另一方面在資訊科技方面，也提出另外一種新概念於相關專利搜尋。

Nowadays, the search for relevant patents plays an important role in product life cycle. If a product manager can retrieve relevant patents according to his/her criteria for a new product quickly and accurately, s/he will be able to efficiently and effectively judge if the tentative product has the complete feature set, any risks in patent infringement, and its potential in technology competition. However, the increasing number of patents creates the additional efforts in patent search in terms of quantity and complexity. Bewaring the emerging need of prior art retrieval from a large patent database, the main objective of this study is to develop a methodology which can build the claim hierarchy automatically in order to retrieve the most relevant patents for a product with technologies from various disciplines.
Most existing patent retrieval tools use keywords to find relevant patents; however, they ignore the structure of the invention, which mentions in the claim of patent. Thus, this study parses the sentences of a patent claim and finds the structure of the invention. Then, we compare the similarity of the structure of inventions and retrieve the most relevant patents. In order not to ignore potential relevant patents, the proposed relevant patent retrieval method uses keyword-based patent retrieval technique first. Subsequently, the system uses the automated generated claim trees to retrieve the most relevant patents from the patent set retrieved by keywords. Finally, users could adjust the inner and core patent set to decide how much relevant patents retained as the outputs.
The major contribution of this thesis is to decrease the effort for product managers to search relevant patents in product development life cycle. This thesis can serve as a benchmark for researchers to compare with follow-up tech mining techniques.

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