Fine-Grained Information Access and Text Mining for Patent Documents
Junichi Tsujii
Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo, Japan
School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK
Due to the rapid growth of patent application and strategic importance of patents andintellectual properties, intelligent text management tools have become essential for
success of diverse institutions. The importance of patents has been increasingly realized
by governments, various research institutes such universities as well as privatecompanies. Globalized technology development has also made multi-lingual processing
techniques of patent documents inevitable.
As such, the needs for NLP-based text management systems for patent documents arebecoming apparent and explicit. On the hand, NLP technologies, especially information
extraction and machine translation techniques, have made significant progress in thelast decade. Parsing technology and its application to relation extraction, for example,
are being successfully applied to various types of documents including news-wirearticles, scientific documents, etc. Robust machine translation systems are now publicly
available, and being used for translating diverse types of documents. Persistent,
long-term researches on mono-lingual and cross-lingual information retrieval, passage
retrieval and question-answering are bearing their fruits and are now ready for realapplication.
In this talk, I will discuss the future forms of NLP-based text mining technology andits potential application to intelligent patent document management systems.

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岡崎 輝雄
特許庁 普及支援課特許情報企画室 調査班長
特許庁は海外利用者向けに、公開特許公報の英文抄録である PAJ（Patent Abstracts ofJapan）のほか、同公報の機械翻訳サービスを特許電子図書館（IPDL: Industrial Property
Digital Library）で提供し、多種多様なニーズに応えるようサービス内容の拡充に努めています。また、海外の特許庁審査官に対しては、共通する特許出願についてそのサーチ及び審査結果に関する情報を有効利用するために機械翻訳を用いた高度産業財産ネットワー
ク(AIPN: Advanced Industrial Property Network)を運用しています。このネットワークにより、海外の特許庁においては、包袋書類(出願人が我が国特許庁に提出した明細書あるいは拒絶理由通知書といった、特許出願の審査に係る書類等)を、機械翻訳により英語で利用することが可能になり、我が国出願人の海外での特許権取得の迅速化が期待されています。
Current Situation and Future Vision of Machine Translation in Japan Patent Office
Teruo Okazaki
Deputy Director of Information Dissemination and Policy Division, General Affairs
Department, Japan Patent Office
The JPO has been making efforts to upgrade and expand our service contents in orderto satisfy a variety of needs of the IP information users overseas by providing, inaddition to PAJ (Patent Abstracts of Japan) which are the abstracts of the published JP
patent applications, the Japanese-English machine translation service of those JP
applications on the IPDL (Industrial Property Digital Library). Also, for the patentexaminers in the foreign patent offices, the JPO has AIPN (Advanced IndustrialProperty Network) which allows those examiners to make the most of the search andexamination results of the patent applications common to the JPO and the office bymeans of English machine translation. It is believed that providing AIPN enables theexaminers in the foreign patent offices to use file wrapper information (which contains
the documentation of a patent application filed by the Japanese applicant with the JPO,
including the description or other documents issued during the procedure such thenotification for reason for refusal) in the form of English machine-translated text, andthus is expected to promote or accelerate obtaining a patent in foreign countries forJapanese applicants.

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CPIC's MT Development: Current Status and Future Directions
Dan Wang
Director of Information Processing Dept., CPIC (China Patent Information Center)
Following JPO and KIPO, SIPO launched a Chinese to English Patent MT system inApril 2008, as a response to the increasing need of IP professionals and the generalpublic to access patent documents in Chinese. In order to tackle the crucial issue oftranslation quality, various measures, including a diagnostic evaluation approach
employing a set of manually constructed check-points have been implemented in theprocess of system development and improvement. This approach was also proved to beeffective in the English to Chinese MT system developed and launched by the China
Patent Information Center (CPIC) in April 2010. Currently, a Japanese to Chinese MTsystem is under development. While these systems use RBMT engines in essence,experiments of other two paradigms (SMT and EBMT) are planned to be performed inthe future.

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Current Status of Korea’s Machine Translation for Patent Domain Users

Minah Kim
Director, Global Division, Siriussoft Corporation

Machine Translation (MT) is very useful in patent searching especially when the patentdocuments are written in foreign languages.

In this regard, Korean Intellectual

Property Office (KIPO) introduced its first Japanese to Korean MT system in year 2000
exclusively for KIPO examiners.

Since then, KIPO has expanded its MT service

coverage into other languages, such as Korean to English and English to Korean, andits client bases into the general public and other Intellectual Property Offices. The
selected MT engine, which was developed by Siriussoft Corporation, is different because
it has been fully customized to meet needs and requirements of patent domain users.
The quality of MT is not perfect, but it is widely recognized to be understandable anduseful by its clients from 37 countries.

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