PACLIC_21_00_010_Choi.pdf

Customizing an English-Korean Machine Translation System for Patent Translation* Sung-Kwon Choi, Young-Gil Kim Natural Language Processing Team, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, 161 Gajeong-dong, Youseong-gu, Daejon, Korea, 305-350 {choisk, kimyk}@etri.re.kr Abstract. This paper addresses a method for customizing an English-to-Korean machine translation system from general domain to patent domain. The customizing method consists of following steps: 1) linguistically studying about characteristics of patent documents, 2) extracting unknown words from large patent documents and constructing large bilingual terminology, 3) extracting and constructing the patent-specific translation patterns 4) customizing the translation engine modules of the existing general MT system according to linguistic study about characteristics of patent documents, and 5) evaluating the accuracy of translation modules and the translation quality. This research was performed under the auspices of the MIC (Ministry of Information and Communication) of Korean government during 2005-2006. The translation accuracy of the customized English-Korean patent translation system is 82.43% on the average in 5 patent fields (machinery, electronics, chemistry, medicine and computer) according to the evaluation of 7 professional human translators. In 2006, the patent MT system started an on-line patent 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) tries to launch an English-Korean patent MT service. Keywords: Machine Translation, Customization, Patent Machine Translation 1. Introduction An English-Korean machine translation system has been developed in earnest in Korea since 1996. We have applyed it to different areas such as web translation (Choi, 1999) and broadcasting subtitle translation (Choi, 2001). Recently, the nat