DETAILED ACTION
This action is responsive to the claims filed on 08/28/2025. Claims 1-6 and 8-20 are pending for examination.
This action is Final.
Response to Amendments
In response to the applicant’s arguments that Yin fails to teach “receiving a respective concatenation of the respective column name and an attribute value for each attribute at a pretrained transformer” because Yin concatenates the utterance and all columns for a row, the examiner respectfully disagrees. Yin explicitly forms, for each attribute/column, a distinct concatenation of that column’s name, type, and value (e.g., Year | real | 2005), and feeds the sequence of these concatenations into the Transformer (BERT), then computes a separate column embedding by pooling the Transformer outputs aligned with that column’s tokens (see the 103 rejection of claim 1 below, Yin – “generating… a respective attribute embedding…”, page 4, col. 1, paragraph 2, and page 4, col. 2, paragraph 4). Under the broadest reasonable interpretation, the claim does not exclude the presence of other tokens in the same transformer input or require separate transformer calls per attribute; it simply requires that, for each attribute, a concatenation of the attribute’s name and value be received at a pretrained transformer and used to generate an attribute embedding, which Yin clearly does.
In response to the applicant’s arguments that Cvitkovic does not teach “generating an entity embedding based on the respective attribute embedding for each attribute … and the referenced entity embedding” because the hidden state is produced by a single transformation of all features, the examiner respectfully disagrees. In the proposed combination, the features of each node in Cvitkovic’s graph are built from Yin’s per-attribute embeddings for that row, so the node’s own state already reflects the attribute embeddings (see the 103 rejection of claim 1 below, Yin – “generating… a respective attribute embedding…”, page 4, col. 1, paragraph 2, and page 4, col. 2, paragraph 4). Cvitkovic then performs message-passing along foreign-key links so that each node updates its state using both its own prior state and information received from linked rows in other tables, i.e., foreign keys (see the 103 rejection of claim 1 below, Cvitkovic – “wherein generating… data tables”, page 2, paragraph 1, and “generating an entity embedding… with the first data entity and the referenced entity embedding” page 11, paragraph 2). Those linked rows correspond to the claimed “referenced entities.” Thus, the resulting node state is an entity embedding that is based on both (1) the entity’s own attribute embeddings and (2) embeddings of referenced entities, as required by the amended claim.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or non-obviousness.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claims 1-3, 4, 5, 6, 8-9, 11-13, 15, 16-18, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable by Yin et al., ((2020). TaBERT: Pretraining for joint understanding of textual and tabular data. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.08314.), hereafter referred to as Yin, in view of Cvitkovic (Cvitkovic, M. (2020). Supervised learning on relational databases with graph neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.02046.), hereafter referred to as Cvitkovic, and in further view of Bouyarmane et al., (US 11797530), hereafter referred to as Bouyarmane.
Claim 1: Yin teaches the following limitations:
receiving a corpus of training data including a plurality of data tables, wherein each data table defines a respective set of attributes for a respective set of data entities corresponding to each data table entity schema, wherein a first data entity of a first set of data entities of first data table entity schema is associated with a topic characteristic based on a first set of attributes defined by the first data table, and wherein a first attribute of the first set of attributes is associated with a structural characteristic that is common across each of the first set of data entities of the first data table; (Yin, page 3, figure 1, “A content snapshot of the table is created based on the input NL utterance.”, an example training data table is shown in figure 1, data entities represented by each row are associated to a topic characteristic found by the vertical self-attention layer outlined in section 3.1. Attributes are represented by columns and their identifier is the name of the column. Attributes shares structural characteristic from each other that is common across data entities.)
identifying a respective column name for each attribute of the first set of attributes of the first data table; (Yin, page 6, col. 2, paragraph 2, “Its column representation cj is defined by mean-pooling over the Transformer’s output encodings that correspond to the column name (e.g., the representation for the Year column in Fig. 1 is derived from the vector of the Year token in Eq. (1)).”, the column representation or column attribute is represented by the column name.)
generating, for each attribute of the first set of attributes corresponding to the first data entity, a respective attribute embedding based on receiving a respective concatenation of the respective column name and an attribute value for each attribute; (Yin, page 4, col. 1, paragraph 2, “Fig. 1(B) depicts the linearization for R2, which consists of a concatenation of the utterance, columns, and their cell values. Specifically, each cell is represented by the name and data type5 of the column, together with its actual value, separated by a vertical bar. As an example, the cell sh2,1i valued 2005 in R2 in Fig. 1 is encoded as
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”, For each attribute/column of the first data table, Yin forms a respective concatenated string of that column’s name and value for each row (e.g., Year | real | 2005 for the “Year” attribute).
Yin, page 4, col. 2, paragraph 4, “Utterance and Column Representations A representation cj is computed for each column cj by mean-pooling over its vertically aligned cell vectors, {
s
<
i
,
j
>
: Ri in content snapshot}, from the last vertical layer. A representation for each utterance token, xj , is computed similarly over the vertically aligned token vectors.”, Yin teaches that for each selected row, TABERT consists of a concatenation of the utterance, columns, and their cell values. Specifically, each cell is represented by the name and data type of the column, together with its actual value, TABERT then computes “a representation c_j … for each column j by mean-pooling over its vertically aligned cell vectors” produced by the model. Thus, for each attribute/column there is a respective concatenation of that column’s name and value.)
at a pre-trained transformer (Yin, page 2, col. 1, paragraph 2, “In this paper we present TABERT, a pretraining approach for joint understanding of NL text and (semi-)structured tabular data (§ 3). TABERT is built on top of BERT, and jointly learns contextual representations for utterances and the structured schema of DB tables (e.g., a vector for each utterance token and table column). Specifically, TABERT linearizes the structure of tables to be compatible with a Transformer-based BERT model.”, Yin expressly introduces TABERT as “a pretrained language model that jointly learns representations for NL sentences and (semi-)structured tables,” and describes it as built on a Transformer-based language model (BERT) that is pretrained on large corpora of text and table/context pairs before being used as a feature extractor for downstream tasks. Accordingly, the Transformer encoder in TABERT is a pretrained Transformer-based machine-learning model.)
Cvitkovic, in the same field of machine learning embedding, teaches the following limitations which Yin fails to explicitly teach:
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Figure 1 of Cvitkovic, Step 2a-2c of Appendix A
wherein generating a first attribute embedding for the first attribute of the first set of attributes comprises: generating a referenced entity embedding for a second data entity that is referenced by the first attribute, the referenced entity embedding generated using data of a second data table of the plurality of data tables; (Cvitkovic, page 2, paragraph 1, “What makes RDBs “relational” is that the values in a column in one table can refer to rows of another table. For example, in Figure 1 the column T Visit :,patient_id refers to rows in T Patient based on the values in T Patient :,patient_id. The value in T Visit i,patient_id indicates which patient came for Visit i. A column like this that refers to another table is called a foreign key.”, These quotes show that a column (i.e., the “first attribute”) in one table can refer to a row in another table (i.e., the “second data entity”), and that this is a foreign-key relationship. In Cvitkovic’s system, each row becomes a node in a graph, and each foreign key induces an edge to another node. The referenced entity embedding corresponds to the hidden state of that target node (hᵗ⁻¹ʷ), which is generated using that second table’s data and passed via message-passing to the first node.)
generating an entity embedding based on the respective attribute embedding for each attribute of the first set of attributes associated with the first data entity and the referenced entity embedding; (Cvitkovic, page 11, paragraph 2, “For each iteration t from 1 to T: (a) Each vertex v sends a “message”
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to each of its neighbors w, where Nv is the set of all neighbors of v.
(b) Each vertex v aggregates the messages it received using a function At, where At takes a variable number of arguments and is invariant to permutations of its arguments:
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(c) Each vertex v updates its hidden state as a function of its current hidden state and the aggregated messages it received:
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”, Cvitkovic’s message-passing GNN takes a graph where each vertex v (a database row/entity) has features x_v and initializes a hidden state “h⁰_v = S(x_v)”; then, at each iteration, each vertex sends messages mᵗ_{vw} to neighbors, aggregates them mᵗ_v, and “updates its hidden state as a function of its current hidden state and the aggregated messages: hᵗ_v = Uᵗ(hᵗ⁻¹_v, mᵗ_v).” In the combination, x_v is formed from the per-attribute embeddings (in this combination it is provided by Yin), and neighbor states hᵗ⁻¹_w correspond to referenced entities linked by foreign keys. The resulting hᵗ_v is therefore an entity embedding based on (i) the attribute embeddings for each attribute of the entity and (ii) embeddings of referenced entities, as recited in the amended claim.)
It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the teachings disclosed by Yin with the teachings disclosed by Cvitkovic (i.e., generating an entity level embedding using relational embeddings referenced by attributes). A motivation for the combination is to provide a method to combine relational structures of databases to embeddings without the need of manual processing. (Cvitkovic, page 1, section 1, paragraph 3, “we introduce a method based on Graph Neural Networks that operates on RDB data in its relational form without the need for manual feature engineering or flattening.”).
Bouyarmane, in the same field of machine learning embedding, teaches the following limitations which Yin or Cvitkovic fails to explicitly teach:
and parameterizing the topic characteristic for each data entity of the first set of data entities and the structural characteristic for each attribute of the first set of attributes in the machine learning model by generating the attribute embeddings and the entity embedding for each data entity of the first set of data entities (Bouyarmane, col. 10, lines 55-59, “ A given similarity analysis request may indicate a pair of entity records expressed not just in different languages, but also in different schemas in some embodiments, for example with some attributes of the first schema of the pair missing entirely from the second schema (and/or vice versa)”, the examiner interprets topic characteristics as representing the main topic or characteristic of that table of entities. In this case, an analysis request which comprises generating embeddings for attributes and entities, has a way to differentiate the topic characteristics of different schemas, such as having differing attributes.
Col. 2, lines 51-53, “Generally speaking, an entity record may be intended to be used to represent or capture various characteristics of a real-world object”, each entity table represents a certain characteristic of a real-world object.
Col. 16, lines 11-15, “For example, supported character lists containing 100 or 200 characters may be used in some embodiments. In at least some embodiments, the length of the supported character list 655 may be implemented as a tunable hyper-parameter.”, it is interpreted by the examiner that a structural characteristic represents a predefine structure or rule to determine the semantic order of values. In this case, a character list defines a structural characteristic of values.).
It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified the teachings disclosed by Yin with the teachings disclosed by Bouyarmane (i.e., generating an entity level embedding and parameterizing the characteristic throughout the dataset). A motivation for the combination is to provide further attention to similar attributes, thus allowing for more accurate identification of entity-attribute relations. (Bouyarmane, col. 4, lines 13-17, ” Because information contained in the entity records is encoded starting at the character level, problems such as misspellings of words, placing of words in the wrong attributes (e.g., including the color of an object in the “title” attribute), or even disparities in entity record schemas, may be overcome in the proposed embedding methodology.”).
Claim 2: Yin, Cvitkovic, and Bouyarmane teaches the limitations of claim 1, Yin further teaches:
receiving an input that corresponds to a data entity and an indication of an attribute type identifier, wherein the attribute type identifier corresponds to a column name of at least one data table of the plurality of data tables; (Yin, page 3, figure 1, “A content snapshot of the table is created based on the input NL utterance.”, an example training data table is shown in figure 1, data entities represented by each row are associated to a topic characteristic found by the vertical self-attention layer outlined in section 3.1. Attributes are represented by columns and their identifier is the name of the column. Attributes shares structural characteristic from each other that is common across data entities.
Yin, page 6, col. 2, paragraph 2, “Its column representation cj is defined by mean-pooling over the Transformer’s output encodings that correspond to the column name (e.g., the representation for the Year column in Fig. 1 is derived from the vector of the Year token in Eq. (1)).”, the column representation or column attribute is represented by the column name.);
and generating, by the machine learning model, an output that includes a value corresponding to the attribute type identifier based at least in part on the input (Bouyarmane, col. 17, lines 4-11, “Similarly, output generated for all of the tokens of a given attribute, produced by token-level embedding model 754, may be combined and used as input to the attribute-level embedding model 756. In addition, output generated for all of the attributes of a given entity record, produced by attribute-level embedding model 756, may be combined and used as input to the entity-level embedding model 758.”, an output is generated which contains the attribute type identifier, which was prepended to the sequence of tokens as previously mentioned above).
Claim 3: Yin, Cvitkovic, and Bouyarmane teaches the limitations of claim 1, Bouyarmane teaches the following limitations:
generating, by the machine learning model, an input embedding based at least in part on the input, wherein the output is generated based at least in part on the input embedding and the indication of the attribute type identifier (Bouyarmane, col. 17, lines 4-8, “Similarly, output generated for all of the tokens of a given attribute, produced by token-level embedding model 754, may be combined and used as input to the attribute-level embedding model 756.”, an input (tokens), which contains an attribute type identifier represented by a prepended attribute name, is embedded and is resultantly an output to an attribute-level embedding model).
Claim 4: Yin, Cvitkovic, and Bouyarmane teaches the limitations of claim 1, Yin further teaches:
wherein each row of the first data table corresponds to a respective data entity of the first set of data entities (Yin, page 3, figure 1, “A content snapshot of the table is created based on the input NL utterance.”, an example training data table is shown in figure 1, data entities are represented by each row.).
Claim 5: Yin, Cvitkovic, and Bouyarmane teaches the limitations of claim 1, Yin further teaches:
using a transformer based machine learning model as the pretrained transformer to generate the respective attribute embeddings and the entity embedding, wherein the transformer based machine learning model comprises one or more transformer encoder blocks that implements an attention mechanism that is configured to sample one or more token embeddings of tokens related to the topic characteristic and included in the attribute value for each attribute, wherein sampling the one or more token embeddings to generate the entity embeddings results in the parameterizing of the topic characteristic for each data entity of the first set of data entities. (Yin, page 4, col. 2, paragraph 1, “The base Transformer model in TABERT outputs vector encodings of utterance and cell tokens for each row. These row-level vectors are computed separately and therefore independent of each other. To allow for information flow across cell representations of different rows, we propose vertical self-attention, a self-attention mechanism that operates over vertically aligned vectors from different rows”, the transformer model used in Yin uses self-attention layers to sample token level embeddings.).
Claim 6: Yin, Cvitkovic, and Bouyarmane teaches the limitations of claim 1, Yin further teaches:
wherein generating the entity embedding comprises: generating a sampling distribution using an attention layer that receives the respective attribute embedding for each attribute of the first set of attributes as input and sampling the sampling distribution to generate the entity embedding (Yin, page 4, col. 2, paragraph 1, “The base Transformer model in TABERT outputs vector encodings of utterance and cell tokens for each row. These row-level vectors are computed separately and therefore independent of each other. To allow for information flow across cell representations of different rows, we propose vertical self-attention, a self-attention mechanism that operates over vertically aligned vectors from different rows”, the transformer model used in Yin uses self-attention layers to sample token level embeddings.
Page 6, col. 2, paragraph 1, “During pretraining, for each table and its associated NL context in the corpus, we create a series of training instances of paired NL sentences (as synthetically generated utterances) and tables (as content snapshots) by (1) sliding a (non-overlapping) context window of sentences with a maximum length of 128 tokens, and (2) using the NL tokens in the window as the utterance, and pairing it with randomly sampled rows from the table as content snapshots. TABERT is implemented in PyTorch using distributed training”
Page 3, col. 1, paragraph 1, “A masked LM defines a distribution pθ(xm|xe) over the target tokens xm given the masked context xe.”, the distribution being sampled.).
Claim 8: Yin, Cvitkovic, and Bouyarmane teaches the limitations of claim 1, Bouyarmane further teaches:
generating, for each token of the attribute value for the first attribute, a token embedding, wherein the respective attribute embedding for the attribute value is generated based at least in part on each token embedding for the attribute value. (Bouyarmane, col. 17, lines 34-41, “In token-level BiLSTM analysis 804, respective vector or tensor embeddings created for each token of each attribute from the character-level analysis may then be used to generate attribute-level representations”, tensor embeddings are generated for each token, which is later used to generate attribute-level representations (the attribute embeddings)).
Claim 9: Yin, Cvitkovic, and Bouyarmane teaches the limitations of claim 1, Cvitkovic further teaches:
The method of claim 1, further comprising: identifying that a second attribute value for a second attribute corresponding to a column of the first data table references the second data entity of the second data table of the plurality of data tables; (Cvitkovic, page 2, paragraph 1, “What makes RDBs “relational” is that the values in a column in one table can refer to rows of another table. For example, in Figure 1 the column T Visit :,patient_id refers to rows in T Patient based on the values in T Patient :,patient_id. The value in T Visit i,patient_id indicates which patient came for Visit i. A column like this that refers to another table is called a foreign key.”, This explicitly describes a column in one table (here, patient_id in Visit) referencing rows in another table (Patient). The column is thus acting as a foreign key, which directly corresponds to the “second attribute” recited in Claim 9. It is interpreted that recognizing this foreign key relationship is analogous to identifying that a value in the second attribute (e.g., bbb in Visit[i, patient_id]) refers to a specific second data entity (row in Patient) of figure 1 above.)
and using, for the respective attribute embedding for the second attribute, the referenced entity embedding that is generated for the second data entity using the data of the second data table, (Cvitkovic, page 11, paragraph 2, “For each iteration t from 1 to T: (a) Each vertex v sends a “message”
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to each of its neighbors w, where Nv is the set of all neighbors of v.”, In the GNN formulation, a message is computed and passed from one node (data entity) to another via a foreign key edge. The term hᵗ⁻¹ʷ in this formula is the referenced entity embedding of the second data entity (neighbor node w), and it is computed using that entity’s own table data. This embedding becomes part of the message used to enrich other nodes’ embeddings—including the one corresponding to the second attribute in the first table. Therefore, the referenced entity embedding (hᵗ⁻¹ʷ) is used in the embedding logic for the second attribute.)
wherein the entity embedding for the first data entity is generated based at least in part on the referenced entity embedding for the second data entity, (Cvitkovic, page 11, paragraph 2, “(c) Each vertex v updates its hidden state as a function of its current hidden state and the aggregated messages it received:
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”, The entity embedding for node v (the first data entity) is computed through a neural update function Uₜ, which takes its previous embedding and a set of aggregated messages mᵗᵥ. Those messages contain values like hᵗ⁻¹ʷ from the referenced entity node (of the second data entity), meaning that the embedding hᵗᵥ is explicitly based in part on the referenced entity embedding of the second entity.)
and wherein the first attribute embedding comprises a vectorized representation and the referenced entity embedding and the entity embedding comprise fixed -length vectors. (Cvitkovic, page 11, paragraph 2, “A function S is used to initialize a hidden state vector h 0 v ∈ R d for each vertex:
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… Each vertex v updates its hidden state … hᵗᵥ = Uₜ(hᵗ⁻¹ᵥ, mᵗᵥ).”, Each attribute is vectorized into a fixed-length hidden state using function S, and that vector (h⁰ᵥ) is used as the initial node embedding, satisfying the claim’s “first attribute embedding comprises a vectorized representation.” The final entity embedding (hᵗᵥ) and referenced entity embedding (hᵗ⁻¹ʷ) are both real-valued vectors of fixed dimensionality ℝᵈ, confirming that all vectors involved are fixed-length, as recited by the claim.).
The rationale for motivation to combine Yin with Cvitkovic is similar to that of claim 1 above.
Claims 11-13 and 16-18 recite limitations substantially similar to claims 1-3. Therefore, the rejection of claims 1-3 similarly applies to claims 11-13 and 16-18 respectively.
Claims 14 and 19 recite limitations substantially similar to claim 4. Therefore, the rejection of claim 4 similarly applies to claims 14 and 19.
Claims 15 and 20 recite limitations substantially similar to claim 5. Therefore, the rejection of claim 5 similarly applies to claims 15 and 20.
Claim 10 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Yin, Cvitkovic, Bouyarmane, and Green et al. (EP 3316185 A1), hereinafter referred to as Green.
Claim 10: Yin, Cvitkovic, and Bouyarmane teaches the limitations of claim 1, Green, in the same field of entity embedding, teaches the following limitations which Bouyarmane fails to teach:
identifying that the attribute value for a second attribute references set of related attribute values (Green, paragraph 62, “the system may determine the initial embedding for each entity attribute in the second set of entity attributes by taking an average of the sum of the embeddings of pages that are associated with the respective topic”, the initial embedding for an entity in a second set references other embeddings with attributes associated to the respective topic);
and generating a respective attribute embedding for each related attribute value of the set of related attribute values, wherein each of the attribute embeddings for each related attribute value is based on the identified attribute type identifier and the entity embedding is generated based on the each of the attribute embeddings for each related attribute value (Green, paragraph 61, “when the embeddings of entities are updated in step 440 of FIG. 4, all of the embeddings of entities may be updated, not just the embeddings in the particular set associated with that iteration (i.e., the first, second, third, and fourth sets of entity embeddings may be updated, not just the fourth set of entity embeddings)”, when an embedding is updated, other embeddings from other sets associated with it are also updated).
It would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art to have incorporated the teachings disclosed by Yin with the teachings disclosed by Green (i.e., identifying a second entity embedding and using it to generate the first entity embedding). A motivation for the combination is to further refine the embeddings used to train the machine learning model. (Green, paragraph 60, “At step 440, the system uses a pooling algorithm to determine updated embeddings for the set of entities from step 410 based on the refined embeddings of the set of entity attributes determined at step 430.”).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record on the PTO-892 and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure:
Schlichtkrull, M., Kipf, T. N., Bloem, P., Van Den Berg, R., Titov, I., & Welling, M. (2018). Modeling relational data with graph convolutional networks. In The semantic web: 15th international conference, ESWC 2018, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, June 3–7, 2018, proceedings 15 (pp. 593-607). Springer International Publishing.
Graham, D., Wang, J., & Ravanbakhsh, S. (2019). Equivariant entity-relationship networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.09033.
Wu, Y., Liu, X., Feng, Y., Wang, Z., & Zhao, D. (2019). Jointly learning entity and relation representations for entity alignment. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.09317.
Kilias, T., Löser, A., Gers, F. A., Koopmanschap, R., Zhang, Y., & Kersten, M. (2018). Idel: In-database entity linking with neural embeddings. arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.04884.
Yu, T., Wu, C. S., Lin, X. V., Wang, B., Tan, Y. C., Yang, X., ... & Xiong, C. (2020). Grappa: Grammar-augmented pre-training for table semantic parsing. arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.13845.
Mudgal Sunil Kumar, S. (2018). Deep Learning for Entity Matching: A Design Space Exploration.
Nie, H., Han, X., He, B., Sun, L., Chen, B., Zhang, W., ... & Kong, H. (2019, November). Deep sequence-to-sequence entity matching for heterogeneous entity resolution. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (pp. 629-638).
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to HYUNGJUN B YI whose telephone number is (703)756-4799. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 9-5.
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/H.B.Y./Examiner, Art Unit 2124
/USMAAN SAEED/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2146
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