Georg Artelsmair
Director European Co-operation
Talk: "Recent developments in machine translation policy at the European Patent Office"
Co-operation programme on European language technology services for patents
Objectives
With progressing economic integration, language technology services have become increasingly important for overcoming language barriers in the area of patent information and examination. This is particularly true in the context of European integration and the language challenges of the EU patent. Thus, providing state-of-the-art language technology services for patents has become essential:
- to support the dissemination and use of multi-lingual patent information, also in the perspective of the forthcoming EU patent;
- to support the patent examination procedure.
European language technology services
The new co-operation programme will replace the previous "European Machine Translation Programme" launched in 2004. It will be given high priority and aims to progressively provide language technology services for patents from English (and later on, from French and German) into all languages of the EPC contracting states, and vice-versa, to technically qualified users skilled in the art.
The programme consists of four phases:
- building the corpora of patent documents - risk: lack of sufficient numbers;
- delivery of language services - risk: lack of suitable translation engines;
- services integration into existing tools
- maintenance.
In order to address possible bottlenecks the EPO will also collaborate with the European Commission.
Short Biography
Born in Kirchdorf/Austria in 1961. Studied Applied Physics and gained a PhD in Political Sciences from the Technical University, Munich. He works at the European Patent Office as Director of the Directorate "European Cooperation". His publications deal with the impact of Globalisation on the patent system in Europe.
