Machine Translation at the EPO
Removing language barriers from patent documentation

Paul Schwander
European Patent Office
The 5th Workshop on Patent Translation, MT Summit 201319/09/2013

Roadmap The context: why is MT strategic?
 Machine Translation @ the EPO:
state of play and future plansWhy Machine Translation?

- Reducing the language
barrier in the Europeancontext: Unitary Patentsystem supported by MT.
- Access to global patent
information for prior art
searches.

Global patent filings rising continuously, especially Chinese applications
IP5= Europe, USA, Japan, China and KoreaAccessing Asian languages patent for EPO
examiners

Addressing the Chinese language wall

 MT Full-text acquired,ca. 5 milion documents.
 An on demand manualtranslation service
offered to examiner 5 million patents:
manual translation -> 1
day a patent -> 22 yearsof work for a team of1000 translators.

Search in
MTed text

DetectRelevant patents

Understand
Order a manualtranslation

Patent Translate launched on 29 February 2012
System integrated in Espacenet,
the EPO Publication Server and EPOQUE

Patent Translate: how does it work?
 Result of a collaboration between the EPO and Google Patent data represent a huge source of corpora.

 Patent documents and their translation/corresponding
documents are prepared and stored in a corpora repository.
 Translation system is trained using this corpora.
 Translation quality assessed before launch: test fit for purpose
level.

Patent Translate: Architecture
Espacenet

Publication Server

Bulk

Examiner tools

GPI«Functionblock»Business Services::ApplicationBE«Component»
ApplicationBE::FileManagerBE
Actors::PatentApplicant
Installation-GUI

Update-GUI

Update Plugin

Actors::ITAdministartor«Functionblock»
SysManag.::Installation«document»
InstallationGuideline«Component»
Superinstalleruses/provides«Component»
LiveUpdateinstall«file»
Installation Packages«file»
ConfigurationFile

providesprovides«file»
ExternalSoftware

soap via httpprovides«file»OLF Software build«file»
OLF & NO Plugins

CLI«Functionblock»
SysManag.::Monitoring«file»
Monitoring::Checks

EPO«Component»
EPO::EPO update server

API (REST)

Patent Translate
ServiceTranslation
MemoryNational
PatentOffices

EPO

Translation(Google)CorporaRepository

EPOQuality level ranking

Current achievements
 Patent Translate now covers translations between English and21 other languages: Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch,Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian,Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak,Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish 305 million different machine translations of complete patentdocuments can be accessed 'on the fly', using the current
language pairs offered = 1500 years of work for 1000 translators
if done manuallyPatent Translate usage

Plans Project to be completed end of 2014:32 languages European and Asian.
 2013-2014
Turkish, Estonian, Croatian, Latvian,Lithuanian, Albanian, Macedonian, Serbian,Russian and KoreanPatent Translate : illustrative example (Description)

MT Example

MT Example

Topics around Patent MT

 CLIR or not?
 OCR combined with MT for
non-digitised collections
 Fit for purpose quality
assessment
 Perception of the quality

Conclusion
MT is more than ever a must in the context ofthe global patent documentation:– The size of patent collections to search isincreasing and systematic manual translation
is not an option.
– MT has proven to be fit for purpose– Quality will continue improving

Thank You
www.epo.org
pschwander@epo.org