I am not sure that this will work anytime soon, even if NLP gets better substantially. I think the problem reduces to examination of patents and their novelty.

I am not sure that this will work anytime soon, even if NLP gets better substantially. I think the problem reduces to examination of patents and their novelty. I think that having algorithms to find related work is going to be hard to the point of it being unreliable. For example, in CS there is a trend of changing nomenclature every n years, which I think makes it hard to find related work.