Features Analysis of a Patent Act Based on Legal Condition–Effect Structure: Conversion of Law Texts into Logical Formulas for a Learning Support System

Abstract

With the development of information and communications technology, intellectual property education is expected to become increasingly important. However, it has been shown that intellectual property education is insufficiently conducted in university education faculties of engineering. Therefore, we previously focused on engineering students learning logic circuits to create an e-learning system that displays articles as logic circuits. Evaluation experiments demonstrated the learning effect of this system, but it could not handle all intellectual property laws because it required manually converting law texts into logic circuits in the problem creation process. To address this problem, in this paper we examine a method for converting intellectual property laws into logical formulas. Previous studies have converted law texts into logical formulas to perform consistent tests of law texts, whereas this study aims at more human-comprehensible visualizations. We divide law texts into constituents based on a legal condition–effect structure and convert them into propositional calculus. This paper presents the results of an attempt to convert 101 law texts of typical patent acts in intellectual property law into logical formulas. From the results of integrating the logical formulas into our law text learning system, we describe future policies.