BLANC: Discovering Patent White Space via Changes in Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information Between Multi-View Clusters

BLANC (Blank Landscape Analysis through NPMI Conditioning) is a three‑phase pipeline that uses multi‑view neural topic modeling across application/use, novelty, and inventive step, computes Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (NPMI) to measure cross‑dimensional cluster association, and introduces a conditional detection step that flags combinations whose NPMI drops when the corpus is filtered by a keyword. The drop is quantified by a new metric, ΔNPMI, which identifies combinations that are established globally but unexplored locally. BLANC was evaluated on two USPTO corpora—machine learning/AI and glass compositions—by artificially depleting known technology combinations; it recovered 34.1% and 27.3% of the depleted pairs, respectively, while random removals rarely recovered the target, and it successfully identified a fluorine surface‑treatment × warpage‑suppression candidate in a proprietary float‑glass case.

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