A System for Japanese/English/Korean Multilingual Patent Retrieval

In response to growing needs for cross-lingual patent retrieval, we propose PRIME (Patent Retrieval In Multilingual Environment system), in which users can retrieve and browse patents in foreign languages only by their native language. PRIME translates a query in the user language into the target language, retrieves patents relevant to the query, and translates retrieved patents into the user language. To update a translation dictionary, PRIME automatically extracts new translations from parallel patent corpora. In the current implementation, trilingual (J/E/K) patent retrieval is available. We describe the system design and its evaluation.