BLANC: Discovering Patent White Space via Changes in Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information Between Multi-View Clusters
Shuichi Miyazawa, Kensuke Fujii
Abstract
Identifying white space --- the unexplored but potentially valuable regions of a patent landscape --- is essential for strategic R&D planning, yet existing methods rely on manual patent mapping or apply single-view clustering without quantitative gap detection. We propose BLANC (Blank Landscape Analysis through NPMI Conditioning), a three-phase pipeline combining (1) multi-view neural topic modeling along three semantic dimensions (application/use, novelty, inventive step); (2) Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (NPMI) to quantify cross-dimensional cluster association; and (3) conditional detection that flags combinations whose NPMI drops when the corpus is filtered by a user-specified keyword. The drop is captured by a new metric, $Δ$NPMI, which identifies combinations "established globally, unexplored locally." Because white space has no ground truth, we evaluate BLANC on two public USPTO corpora --- machine learning/AI (5,417 patents, CPC G06N) and glass compositions (1,982 patents, CPC C03C) --- by artificially depleting known technology combinations and testing recovery. When three-quarters of a target pair's documents are removed, BLANC recovers 34.1% (ML/AI) and 27.3% (glass) of the depleted combinations, whereas size-matched removals not aimed at them (random documents, or those of a different established combination) essentially never do: the target is never recovered in 191 decoy trials. Collapsing the three semantic views into one recovers nothing, while prior co-occurrence measures also flag the target under random removal, offering no specificity. In a proprietary case (302 float glass / glass-ceramics patents), the keyword "fluorine" reveals a fluorine surface treatment $\times$ warpage suppression candidate ($Δ$NPMI up to 0.48) that experts had independently identified.