The Harvard USPTO Patent Dataset: A Large-Scale, Well-Structured, and Multi-Purpose Corpus of Patent Applications

Innovation is a major driver of economic and social development, and information about many kinds of innovation is embedded in semi-structured data from patents and patent applications. Although the impact and novelty of innovations expressed in patent data are difficult to measure through traditional means, ML offers a promising set of techniques for evaluating novelty, summarizing contributions, and embedding semantics. In this paper, we introduce the Harvard USPTO Patent Dataset (HUPD), a large-scale, well-structured, and multi-purpose corpus of English-language patent applications filed to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) between 2004 and 2018. With more than 4.5 million patent documents, HUPD is two to three times larger than comparable corpora. Unlike previously proposed patent datasets in NLP, HUPD contains the inventor-submitted versions of patent applications--not the final versions of granted patents--thereby allowing us to study patentability at the time of filing using NLP methods for the first time. It is also novel in its inclusion of rich structured metadata alongside the text of patent filings: By providing each application's metadata along with all of its text fields, the dataset enables researchers to perform new sets of NLP tasks that leverage variation in structured covariates. As a case study on the types of research HUPD makes possible, we introduce a new task to the NLP community--namely, binary classification of patent decisions. We additionally show the structured metadata provided in the dataset enables us to conduct explicit studies of concept shifts for this task. Finally, we demonstrate how HUPD can be used for three additional tasks: multi-class classification of patent subject areas, language modeling, and summarization.

ML4H Abstract Track 2020

A collection of the accepted abstracts for the Machine Learning for Health (ML4H) workshop at NeurIPS 2020. This index is not complete, as some accepted abstracts chose to opt-out of inclusion.

Robust Classification of Financial Risk

Algorithms are increasingly common components of high-impact decision-making, and a growing body of literature on adversarial examples in laboratory settings indicates that standard machine learning models are not robust. This suggests that real-world systems are also susceptible to manipulation or misclassification, which especially poses a challenge to machine learning models used in financial services. We use the loan grade classification problem to explore how machine learning models are sensitive to small changes in user-reported data, using adversarial attacks documented in the literature and an original, domain-specific attack. Our work shows that a robust optimization algorithm can build models for financial services that are resistant to misclassification on perturbations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of adversarial attacks and defenses for deep learning in financial services.