DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Response to Amendment
This Office Action is in response to the Applicant’s response filed on 12/20/2024.
Claims 1 and 10 are amended; claims 19 and 20 are unchanged; claims 21-24 are cancelled; and claims 2-9 and 11-18 are withdrawn from consideration; therefore claims 1, 10, 19, and 20 are pending in the application, of which, claims 1, 10, 19, and 20 are presented in independent form.
Priority
This application is a 371 of PCT/IN2020/050299 filed on 03/28/2020.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statements (IDS) submitted on 09/26/2022, 12/27/2023, and 07/23/2024 were filed in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statements are being considered by the examiner.
Drawings
The drawings submitted on 09/26/2022 are accepted.
Specification
The original specification and the amended specification submitted on 09/26/2022 are accepted.
Examiner’s Note
While no prior art rejection is given by the examiner at this time (see rationale below), the claims 10, 19, and 20 are not allowable as the claims are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 non-statutory subject matter.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claim 10 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The claims do not fall within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter because the claims recite an apparatus for retrieving information using a knowledge base. The claim fails to define any structure or hardware. While the applicant’s specification [0066] does disclose embodiments of the apparatus that are entirely hardware or combination of hardware and software, applicant’s specification [0066] discloses that “…features of the embodiments described herein may be implemented in hardware and/or software.” and specification [0067] discloses that the “…various embodiments are described herein, it should be understood that they have been presented by way of example only, and not limitation. Thus, the breadth and scope of this disclosure should not be limited by any of the above-described exemplary embodiments. Moreover, any combination of the above-described elements in all possible variations thereof is encompassed by the disclosure unless otherwise indicated herein or otherwise clearly contradicted by context.” Therefore, the embodiments of the apparatus does not exclude the possibility of a virtual apparatus (i.e. software-only apparatus) Therefore, the invention can be implemented as only software. These intangible media such as software or other programs are incapable of being touched or perceived absent the tangible medium through which they are conveyed. Accordingly, the claims become nothing more than sets of software instructions which are “software per se”. Therefore, claim 10 recites non-statutory subject matter and is rejected accordingly.
Claim 19 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The claims do not fall within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter because the claim recites only a computer program. Therefore, the invention can be implemented only as software. Intangible media such as software or other programs are incapable of being touched or perceived absent the tangible medium through which they are conveyed. Accordingly, the claim becomes nothing more than sets of software instructions which is “program per se”. Therefore, claim 19 recites non-statutory subject matter and is rejected accordingly.
Claim 20 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The claims do not fall within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter because claim 20 recites a carrier containing the computer program. The claim indicates the carrier can be an electronic signal, an optical signal, or a radio signal.
“A transitory, propagating signal … is not a ‘process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter.’ Those four categories define the explicit scope and reach of subject matter patentable under 35 U.S.C. § 101; thus, such a signal cannot be patentable subject matter.” In re Nuijten, 84 USPQ2d 1495, 1503 (Fed. Cir. 2007).
Therefore, claim 20 recites non-statutory subject matter and is rejected accordingly.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 1 is allowed.
The prior art of record does not render obvious, nor anticipate the combination of claimed elements recited in the independent claims, in particular, the prior art does not teach “receiving a search query entered by a user; based on the received search query, using a first model to identify a category corresponding to the received search query, wherein one or more files are assigned to the identified category and further wherein the first model is a categorization model that functions to map an input to one of M different categories, where M is greater than 1; based on the received search query, a loss function of the first model, and an objective function of a second model, identifying T topics corresponding to the received search query, where T is greater than or equal to 1; using the identified category and the identified topics, performing a search for the received search query only on a part of the knowledge base that is associated with the identified category and/or the identified topics; and based on the performed search, retrieving one or more files associated with the identified category and/or the identified topics, the method further comprising constructing the knowledge base, wherein constructing the knowledge base comprises: obtaining a set of N files, wherein each file included in the set of files is assigned to one of the M different categories. where N is greater than 1:based on content of the N files, the loss function of the first model, and the objective function of the second model, identifying a set of topics, where each topic is a group of one or more keywords; generating the knowledge base using the identified topics; and for each one of the N files, based on a particular category to which the file is assigned and keywords included in the file, adding the file to the knowledge base, wherein identifying the set of topics comprises identifying said group of one or more keywords of each topic using a sum of the loss function of the first model and the objective function of the second model, and wherein the second model is Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model.” (in combination with the other limitations of the independent claims).
The prior arts of record do not teach details about identifying topics corresponding to a received search query based on the received search query, a loss function of a first model, and an objective function of a second model to be used along with identified category corresponding to the received search query to retrieve files from a knowledge base while also constructing the knowledge base utilizing the loss function of the first model, the objective function of the second model, and the content of the files as recited in the claim. The absence of details does not allow for proper hindsight reconstruction of obviousness.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to EDDY CHEUNG whose telephone number is (571)272-9785. The examiner can normally be reached MON-TH 8:00AM-4:00PM EST.
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/Eddy Cheung/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2165
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