Questel, a world leader in intellectual property solutions—including AI-assisted patent search, translation and filing—announced the release of QaECTER, a new AI model for patent search developed and optimized by Questel’s AI Lab scientists reaching state-of-the-art capabilities in semantic patent retrieval. Questel customers using Orbit Intelligence, its AI agent Sophia, and other products including the semantic search feature will substantially benefit from the new QaECTER technology.
To evaluate and measure the performance of the patent search model, Questel’s AI Lab developed Sophia-Bench, a systematic and large-scale benchmark, comprising 10,000 patent queries and 75,000 corpus patents stratified across 10 years. In exacting tests using Sophia-Bench and an independent external benchmark, QaECTER outperforms all competing general-purpose and patent-specific retrieval models (including systems 23 times larger) across every query type, technology domain, and jurisdiction evaluated. These gains stem from novel training methodologies developed by the Questel AI Lab, combining citation-driven supervision with multi-view self-alignment on Questel’s proprietary patent data.
Full technical details of QaECTER’s architecture, training methodology, and performance results, along with Sophia-Bench’s design, are available in a paper published by Questel’s AI Lab scientists on the HAL open science platform: https://hal.science/view/index/docid/5524063.
About QaECTER
The QaECTER model places patent search practitioners at the center of its training methodology. It learns from how examiners and professionals establish relevance between documents, through citation relationships and multiple complementary views of each patent. The model performs consistently across diverse inputs, from invention disclosures and problem statements to claims, abstracts, and technical or figure descriptions. This supports R&D engineers, patent attorneys, examiners, and strategic searchers alike. Within Sophia Search, QaECTER is complemented by an integrated translation layer for multilingual queries, advanced reranking, and additional capabilities designed for professional patent workflows. Orbit Intelligence customers who perform semantic patent searches via Sophia Search report highly relevant results across a wide range of technical domains.
About Sophia-Bench
Sophia-Bench was developed to fill a long-standing gap in patent retrieval: the absence of a benchmark that reflects how patent searches are conducted in practice. Stratified across eight IPC technology sections and 12 filing jurisdictions—including the European, US, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese patent offices—the benchmark tests retrieval across 12 distinct query types, ranging from structured patent fields to AI-generated summaries, with results graded against examiner-cited prior art. Together, these design choices make Sophia-Bench a uniquely realistic tool for evaluating patent search engines across query types, technology domains, and jurisdictions.
Kim Gerdes, Questel’s AI Lab Director and Co-Founder/Chief Technology Officer of qatent (part of Questel since 2024), who is also Professor of Computer Science at the Paris-Saclay University, co-authored both the paper and report. He notes: “Our exceptional team of AI and natural language processing experts collaborates with top academic institutions. We are dedicated to advancing AI in the IP field with models, such as QaECTER, and evaluation tools, such as Sophia-Bench, which are both state-of-the-art. These new developments place our team at the very forefront of modern Deep Learning for information retrieval.”
Availability
QaECTER is available within Sophia Search and other Questel products with semantic search capabilities, including Orbit Intelligence. Sophia-Bench is currently used for internal purposes only at Questel, but will be released in the future so the public can leverage its useful benchmarking capabilities.
Click here to learn more about Orbit Intelligence and exciting new technologies from Questel.
About Questel
Questel provides an integrated suite of IP software and expert-led services to more than 20,000 clients and 1.5M users across 30 countries. Its comprehensive platforms harness best-in-class IP data and cutting-edge agentic AI workflows to boost productivity and efficiency across inventions, patents, design, trademarks and domain names. Questel also offers services supporting the IP lifecycle, including searching, watching, international filing, translation, renewals, and recordals. These solutions, when combined with its IP cost management platform, deliver clients significant savings across the entire IP lifecycle. Questel has 30 offices around the world and is headquartered in Paris, France. Find out more at Questel.com or on LinkedIn.
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