Abstract:

Because intellectual property education in the Faculty of Engineering has been strongly desired by industry and it is meaningful for students to acquire basic knowledge of intellectual property, it is meaningful to include a "intellectual property" as part of the curriculum in the Faculty of Engineering. However, due to the curriculum limitation of many experiments and practical training in the Faculty of Engineering, a more efficient learning method is desirable.

Legal texts are very difficult to read for those who are not familiar with them, and students who have studied as science majors since high school are not good at reading legal texts. On the other hand, however, most of the patent attorneys studied at science universities, especially those who specialize in patents. Therefore, as a system to facilitate studying law for engineering students, the authors noted that students in the Faculty of Engineering, Department of Information and Computer Technology, study "logic circuits" as a required course. Using the fact that legal texts can be written in logical formulas, we defined a problem-solving process model for learning Patent Act based on the problem-solving process model in physics, and developed a learning support system, which was well received by the students. Furthermore, we developed a system for learning legal texts while drawing logic circuits based on the results of this project, which was even more highly evaluated.

On the other hand, the effectiveness of the learning support system seemed to be related to student learner traits. The learning styles of the students were classified according to Felder’s learning style model, and the usage of each component of the learning support system was examined. Students who used the video viewing system for a long time had a “sequential” style. Students who used the law texts learning system for a long time had “active” and “global” styles. Students who used the practice system for a long time had “active” and “sensing” styles. Because the systems developed so far have been adapted to students of the visual style on the "visual-verbal" styles, and there was no system adapted to students of the verbal style, so we developed a learning support system adapted to students of the verbal style in this paper.

We developed a method for learning legal texts by visualizing the "modification structure" in natural language processing. Legal texts is also a syntax. There are various ways to express syntax. In Japanese, each clause is related to one of the following clauses, except for the clause at the end of the sentence. In other words, the engagements in Japanese clauses are unidirectional, from front to back. Although there are exceptions, the dependency relations do not intersect, and this is called the non-intersecting condition. Because they do not intersect, they are easy to draw on the computer, and students can freely draw modification structure in the same way as in the logic circuit assembly method (the logic circuit assembly part of the learning support system is also designed to avoid intersections). The system also allows for the expression of tree structures. A tree consists of nodes and edges, and a node has one parent node except for its root, which has zero or more child nodes.

When this subsystem was piloted with 10 students, it was found that students who were considered "verbal" in the "visual-verbal" style evaluated the system highly.

Keywords:

Intellectual Property law, Learning Support System, Natural Language processing, Dependency Structure, Modification Structure, System Development.