English-Korean Patent Translation System: FromTo-EK/PAT

This paper addresses a method for customizing an English-Korean machine translation system from general domain to patent domain. The customizing method includes the followings: (1) extracting and constructing large bilingual terminology and the patent-specific translation patterns, (2) adapting the probabilities of POS tagger trained from general domain to the patent domain, (3) syntactically analyzing long and complex sentences by recognizing coordinate structures, and (4) selecting a proper target word using patentspecific bilingual dictionary and collocation knowledge extracted from patent corpus. The translation accuracy of the customized English-Korean patent translation system is 82.43% on the average in 5 patent categories (machinery, electronics, chemistry, medicine and computer) according to the evaluation of 7 professional patent translators. A patent MT system for electronics domain was installed and started an on-line MT service in IPAC (International Patent Assistance Center) under MOCIE (Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy) in Korea. In 2007, KIPO (Korean Intellectual Property Office) is expected to launch its English-Korean MT service for whole patent domain.