Patent data contain plenty of valuable information. Recently, the lack of innovative ideas has resulted in some enterprises encountering bottlenecks in product research and development (R&D). Some enterprises point out that they do not have enough comprehension of product components. To improve efficiency of product R&D, this paper introduces natural-language processing (NLP) technology, which includes part-of-speech (POS) tagging and subject-action-object (SAO) classification. Our strategy first extracts patent keywords from products, then applies a complex network to obtain core components based on structural holes and centrality of eigenvector algorism. Finally, we use the example of US shower patents to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the methodology. As a result, this paper examines the acquisition of core components and how they can help enterprises and designers clarify their R&D ideas and design priorities.
Keywords: big data; core components; feature vectors; patent text; structural hole.