Lee International

The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) started a pilot service for examiners to conduct a prior art search using the Artificial Intelligent (AI) technology on March 25, 2022.

This AI-based prior art search is expected to reduce examiner’s burden of time-consuming prior art searches when examining a patent application.  Specifically, the AI technology would automatically extract keywords and key sentences from a patent document to be examined without examiner’s input, and recommend the most relevant prior art documents to the examiner.  Thus, a significant amount of examiner’s effort for searching the prior art documents can be conserved, and improvement in quality of patent examination is expected. 

The AI system was developed in cooperation with Kakao Enterprise by using approximately five million patent documents as learning data and utilizing the extracted key sentences and the unique information of the patent documents, such as Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC). 

At the end of last year, the development of the AI system was completed and the beta testing was conducted with a small number of examiners.  After approximately a year of testing the AI-based prior art search as a pilot service this year, it is expected that the pilot AI-based prior art search would become permanent part of patent examination at the KIPO. 

The KIPO has been already using the AI technology for examining figurative marks and designs since 2021, and, through this pilot service, it is expected that the AI technology will be applied to examination of all areas of intellectual property rights.