Chocolate PCTs from Around the World

Without a doubt, Valentine’s Day proves that one thing transcends all barriers: chocolate.  What better way to prove the universal appeal of chocolate than to conduct an international search for chocolaty inventions?  Although I love chocolate, I unfortunately don’t know how to translate the term into multiple languages.  Luckily, I have the help of the Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR) facility, a cross-lingual searching tool available on PATENTSCOPE.  A recent WIPO press release states the the CLIR added Dutch, Italian, and Swedish to the number of languages in which the user can search, and a total of 12 languages are now available in CLIR.  According to the press release, CLIR “finds synonyms of the search query before translating both the search query and the retrieved synonyms into 11 languages, expanding therefore the scope of patent search.”

Read on to conduct a search through PATENTSCOPE’s collection of PCT documents for chocolate inventions from around the world!

I first go to the English search interface for the CLIR search tool on WIPO’s PATENTSCOPE.  The form allows the user to enter a query (using the PATENTSCOPE search syntax, if the user wants to create a more complex query).   I choose to just use a keyword search for the English term “chocolate”, and I choose the “Automatic” expansion mode (for more information on the “Supervised” expansion mode option, read this WIPO help document on CLIR).   I also choose to make the search as precise as possible, since I only want inventions focused solely on chocolate.

The CLIR English search interface.

The search results display the entire query that was entered into the PATENTSCOPE system, based on the automatic query expansion from the CLIR tool.  The tool appears to translate the English term into German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch, and all terms are searched for in the titles and abstracts of the PCT documents.  I have the option to refine the search criteria or turn the search into an RSS feed to monitor for any new result.

The expanded query for "chocolate" from CLIR.

In the search results, I find a variety of cocoa innovations.  Here are some of my favorites:

• (WO2003013264) HYPOALLERGENIC CHOCOLATE
• (EP0512910) Hypocaloric chocolate
• (WO2007105666) CHOCOLATE DRAWING METHOD

Now you can write a note to your sweetheart on a slab of chocolate. Nothing sweeter.

• (WO2010140451) CHOCOLATE HEATING AND TRANSPORTING DEVICE
• (WO2003084353) SAUSAGE AND CHOCOLATE SNACK

And you thought bacon and chocolate was a good combination...try chocolate sausage!

So enjoy your hypoallergenic/hypocaloric/sausage chocolate, and have a happy Valentine’s Day!

Do you know of any fun Valentine’s Day patents?  Let us know in the comments!

This post was contributed by Joelle Mornini. The Intellogist blog is provided for free by Intellogist’s parent company Landon IP, a major provider of patent searches, trademark searches, technical translations, and information retrieval services.

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