DETAILED ACTION
Status of Claims
This action is in reply to the response received on 11 March 2026.
Claims 1, 2, 8-9, 11, 14, and 18-19 have been amended in the response received.
Claims 15 and 16 were previously canceled.
Claims 1-14 and 17-20 are pending and are rejected.
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 .
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 11 March 2026 has been entered.
Allowable Subject Matter
As indicated in the Office Action mailed on 08 January 2026, claims 1-14 and 17-20 recite allowable subject matter and would be allowable if the claims were re-written or amended to overcome the 101 rejection indicated in the Office Action below.
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.
Claims 1-14 and 17-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because the claimed invention is directed to a judicial exception (i.e., a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea) without significantly more.
Under step 1, it is determined whether the claims are directed to a statutory category of invention (see MPEP 2106.03(II)). In the instant case, claims 1-13 are directed to a method, claims 14 & 17-18 are directed to a product of manufacture (non-transitory computer readable medium), and claims 19-20 are directed to an apparatus.
While the claims fall within statutory categories, under revised Step 2A, Prong 1 of the eligibility analysis (MPEP 2106.04), the claimed invention describes an abstract idea of generating text describing attributes. Specifically, representative claim 1 recites the abstract idea of:
obtaining a first text, a second text, and a data source, wherein the data source includes a plurality of attributes;
determining that a salient attribute in the first text from among the plurality of attributes occurs in the second text an insufficient number of times; and
generating by language and in response to the determination, an augmented text based on the salient attribute by determining a difference between the first text and the second text based on the salient attribute, encoding the difference to obtain a difference embedding and combining the difference embedding with a positional embedding, and performing an attention mechanism on the difference embedding and the positional embedding to obtain the augmented text, wherein the augmented text includes natural langue that describe the salient attribute.
Under revised Step 2A, Prong 1 of the eligibility analysis, it is necessary to evaluate whether the claim recites a judicial exception by referring to subject matter groupings articulated in 2106.04(a) of the MPEP. Even in consideration of the analysis, the claims recite an abstract idea. Representative claim 1 describes the abstract idea of generating text describing attributes as noted above. This concept is considered to be a method of organizing human activity because it relates to sale activities since the claims specifically recite steps of obtaining a first text, a second text, and a data source, where the data source includes a plurality of attributes (i.e., of a product), determining that a salient attribute in the first text from among the plurality occurs in the second text an insufficient number of times, generating by a language and in response to the determination an augmented text based on the salient attribute by determining a difference between the first text and the second text based on the salient attribute, encoding the difference to obtain a difference embedding and combining the difference embedding with a positional embedding, and performing an attention mechanism on the difference embedding and the positional embedding to obtain the augmented text, wherein the augmented text includes natural language that describes the salient attribute, thereby making this a sales activity or behavior. Thus, representative claim 1 recites an abstract idea.
Under revised Step 2A, Prong 2 of the eligibility analysis, if it is determined that the claims recite a judicial exception, it is then necessary to evaluate whether the claims recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application of that exception. In this case, representative claim 1 includes the additional elements of a language generation model, by computing, and a vector space. These additional elements individually and in combination do not integrate the exception into the practical application because they are merely being used to apply the abstract idea using a generic computer, as defined in the MPEP 2106.04(d). Accordingly, these additional elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they do not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea. Claim 1 is directed to an abstract idea.
Under Step 2B of the eligibility analysis, if it is determined that the claims recite a judicial exception that is not integrated into a practical application of that exception, it is then necessary to evaluate the additional elements individually and in combination to determine whether they provide an inventive concept (i.e., whether the additional elements amount to significantly more than the exception itself), as discussed in MPEP 2106.05. In this case, the additional elements a language generation model, by computing, and a vector space recited in the independent claim 1 are recited and described in a generic manner and merely apply the abstract idea using a generic computer (MPEP 2106.05(f)). As such, the additional elements, considered individually and in combination, do not provide an inventive concept.
As such, representative claim 1 is ineligible.
Independent claims 14 and 19 are similar in nature to representative claim 1 and Step 2A, Prong 1 analysis is the same as above for representative claim 1. It is noted that in independent claim 14 includes the additional elements of non-transitory computer readable medium storing instructions that, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to, and independent claim 19 includes the additional elements of a memory component, and a processing device coupled to the memory component, the processing device configured to perform operations. The Applicant’s specification does not provide any discussion or description of non-transitory computer readable medium storing instructions that, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to in claim 14, and a processing device coupled to the memory component, the processing device configured to perform operations in claim 19, as being anything other than generic elements. Thus, the claimed additional elements of claims 14 and 19 are merely generic elements and the implementation of the elements merely amounts to no more than an instruction to apply the abstract idea using a generic computer. As such, the additional elements of claim 14 and 19 do not integrate the judicial exception into a practical application of the abstract idea. Additionally, the additional elements of claim 14 and 19, considered individually and in combination, do not provide an inventive concept because they merely amount to no more than an instruction to apply the abstract idea using a generic computer.
As such, claim 14 and 19 are ineligible.
Dependent claims 2-13, 17-18 and 20, depending from claims 1, 14 and 19, respectively do not aid in the eligibility of the independent claim 1. The claims of 2-13, 17-18, and 20 merely act to provide further limitations of the abstract idea and are ineligible subject matter.
It is noted that dependent claims include the additional elements of cleaning, lemmatizing, stemming, vectorizing (claim 3), saliency machine learning model (claims 5 and 6), knowledge graph (claim 7), training component and training, by the training component, the language generation model based on the training data (claims 10 and 20), and a user interface (claim 11). Applicant’s specification does not provide any discussion or description of the cleaning, lemmatizing, stemming, vectorizing (claim 3), saliency machine learning model (claims 5 and 6), knowledge graph (claim 7), training component and training, by the training component, the language generation model based on the training data (claims 10 and 20), and a user interface (claim 11), as being anything other than a generic element. The claimed additional elements, individually and in combination do not integrate into a practical application and do not provide an inventive concept because they are merely being used to apply the abstract idea using a generic computer (see MPEP 2106.05(f)). Accordingly, claims 3, 5-7, 10-11 and 20 are directed towards an abstract idea. Additionally, the additional elements of claims 3, 5-7, 10-11, and 20, considered individually and in combination, do not provide an inventive concept because they merely amount to no more than an instruction to apply the abstract idea using a generic computer. It is further noted that the remaining dependent claims 2, 4, 8-9, 12-13, and 17-18 do not recite any further additional elements to consider in the analysis, and therefore would not provide additional elements that would integrate the abstract idea into a practical application and would not provide an inventive concept.
As such, dependent claims 2-13, 17-18, and 20 are ineligible.
Response to Arguments
With respect to the rejections made under 35 USC § 101, the Applicant’s arguments filed on 11 March 2026, have been fully considered but are not considered persuasive.
In response to the Applicant’s arguments found on pages 10-11 of the remarks stating “The amended claim 1 does not recite the act of writing a product description or any commercial transaction,” and “does not bring it within the grouping of certain methods of organizing human activity,” and further “The claim limitations themselves recite no sales transactions, no pricing, no purchasing, no negotiating, and no other commercial activity between people,” and “claim 1 does not recite an abstract idea,” the Examiner respectfully disagrees. Under Step 2A, Prong 1 of the eligibility analysis, even when considering the amendments to the claims, the claims do recite and are directed to an abstract idea of generating text describing attributes. Although the claims do not specifically recite the activities of purchasing, negotiating, nor pricing, the claims are still directed to the generation of text describing attributes, which in this case, the claims are interpreted to understand the attributes are related to products, which is consistent to what the Applicant’s specification describes. For example, paragraph [0001] of the Applicant’s specification states that the claimed invention “relates generally to data processing, and more specifically to product description augmentation,” and paragraph [0004] describes that the analysis includes “semantic analysis of a product review for a product to obtain review data including an attribute of the product”. Therefore the Examiner maintains that the claims do recite an abstract idea that falls into the enumerated grouping of a certain method of organizing human activity, where the steps are related to sales activities or behaviors.
In response to the Applicant’s arguments found on pages 10-12 of the remarks stating “The claimed invention is directed to a specific, technical improvement to computer-based natural language processing and data processing systems,” and “Assuming arguendo that claim 1 recites an alleged judicial exception, Applicant respectfully submits that it is patent-eligible because the additional elements of claim 1 integrate any such exception into a practical application. Specifically, amended claim 1 recites a concrete technical improvement to computer-based natural language processing (NLP) systems that is rooted in the specific architecture of transformer-based neural networks” and “claim 1 integrates an alleged judicial exception into a practical application,” the Examiner respectfully disagrees. Under Step 2A, Prong 2 of the eligibility analysis, when considering the amendments to the claims, the claims do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application. The representative independent claim 1 recites the additional elements of a language generation model, by computing, and a vector space. The additional elements, when considered individually and in combination, are not recited in a sufficient manner to integrate the abstract idea as they are still recited in a generic manner, or at a high-level of generality, and are being used to apply the abstract idea with a generic computer and computing components. Further, the claims do not reflect an improvement to the technical field nor do they provide a technological solution to a technological problem. The MPEP (2106.05(a)) provides further guidance on how to evaluate whether claims recite an improvement in the functioning of a computer or an improvement to other technology or technical field. For example, as indicated in 2106.05(d)(1) of the MPEP “the specification should be evaluated to determine if the disclosure provides sufficient details such that one of ordinary skill in the art would recognize the claimed invention as providing an improvement,” and that “[t]he specification need not explicitly set forth the improvement, but it must describe the invention such that the improvement would be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art.” Looking to the specification is a standard that the courts have employed when analyzing claims as it relates to improvements in technology. For example, in Enfish, the specification provided teaching that the claimed invention achieves benefits over conventional databases, such as increased flexibility, faster search times, and smaller memory requirements. Enfish LLC v. Microsoft Corp., 822 F.3d 1327, 1335-36 (Fed. Cir. 2016). Additionally, in Core Wireless the specification noted deficiencies in prior art interfaces relating to efficient functioning of the computer. Core Wireless Licensing v. LG Elecs. Inc., 880 F.3d 1356 (Fed Cir. 2018). With respect to McRO, the claimed improvement, as confirmed by the originally filed specification, was “…allowing computers to produce ‘accurate and realistic lip synchronization and facial expressions in animated characters…’” and it was “…the incorporation of the claimed rules, not the use of the computer, that “improved [the] existing technological process” by allowing the automation of further tasks”. McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games America Inc., 837 F.3d 1299, (Fed. Cir. 2016).
In this case, Applicant’s specification provides no explanation of an improvement to the functioning of a computer or other technology. Rather, the claims focus “on a process that qualifies as an ‘abstract idea’ for which computers are invoked merely as a tool”. Id citing Enfish at 1327, 1336. This is reflected in at least paragraphs [0001]-[0002] of Applicant’s specification, which describe Applicant’s claimed invention is directed toward solving problems related to “efficiently combining additional information with an existing product review”. Although the claims include computer technology such as a language generation model, by computing, and a vector space, such elements are merely peripherally incorporated in order to implement the abstract idea. This is unlike the improvements recognized by the courts in cases such as Enfish, Core Wireless, and McRO. Unlike precedential cases, neither the specification nor the claims of the instant invention identify such a specific improvement to computer capabilities. The instant claims are not directed to improving the existing technological process but are directed to improving the commercial task of generation of text describing attributes. The claimed process, while arguably resulting in improvements to product descriptions, is not providing any improvement to another technology or technical field as the claimed process is not, for example, improving the processor and computer components that operate the system. Rather, the claimed process is utilizing different data while still employing the same processor and computer components used in conventional systems to improve generation of text describing attributes, e.g. commercial process. As such, the claims do not recite specific technological improvements and do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application.
In response to the Applicant’s arguments found on page 13 of the remarks stating “Even assuming arguendo that claim 1 does not integrate an alleged judicial exception into a practical application, Applicant submits that the above-identified additional elements of claim 1 enable the claim when read as a whole to amount to significantly more than the alleged judicial exception,” and “because claim 1 recites additional elements such that claim 1 amounts to significantly more than an alleged judicial exception, claim 1 is patent eligible,” the Examiner respectfully disagrees. Under Step 2B of the eligibility analysis, the amended claims do not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea itself and do not provide an inventive concept because the claims recite additional elements, that when considered in combination, are still recited in a generic manner. As stated above, the claimed additional elements, when considered individually and in combination, do not integrate the abstract idea and are merely being used to apply the abstract idea with generic computing components. Therefore, the amended claims do not provide an inventive concept and do not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea, and thus, the Examiner maintains the 101 rejection.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to ASHLEY PRESTON whose telephone number is (571)272-4399. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 9-5.
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/ASHLEY D PRESTON/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3688