South Korea First Country To Adopt WIPO’s AI Translation Tool

South Korea has become the first country to adopt a groundbreaking patent translating tool developed by the World Intellectual Property Organization.

According to a press release, WIPO and the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) signed a memorandum of understanding that demonstrates KIPO’s intent to integrate the AI translation tool. The signing occurred during the 23-25 May “Meeting of Intellectual Property Offices on ICT Strategies and Artificial Intelligence for IP Administration.”

The tool, called WIPO Translate, uses advanced technology to mirror a language to another language without many words getting lost in translation.

KIPO is the first member state to use WIPO Translate, following organisations such as the United Nations Secretariat and several specialized agencies of the UN, as well as the World Trade Organization.

“WIPO has ‘trained’ the new technology to translate all patent documents in one of the official languages of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish) into English and vice-versa,” according to the release. The Patent Cooperation Treaty is managed by WIPO. WIPO Translate is also used by PATENTSCOPE, a database of 70 million records used by inventors before filing with the PCT.

WIPO Translate “learns” from its previously translated sentence, using what is called neural machine translation, an emerging technology, WIPO said. This gives it the capability to produce more natural word order while seeking improvements.

In addition, the release asserts, “[t]o develop WIPO Translate, WIPO created its own software, based on open-source software and libraries and capitalized on in-house expertise in handling large datasets.”

The Director of KIPO’s Information Management Division, Han Gyudong, said WIPO Translate translates patent filings to “a higher quality of translation for patent documents.”