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 .
DETAILED ACTION
Status of Claims
Claims 1-20 are pending. Claims 1, 8, 11, 17, and 20 are amended.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments regarding the 101 rejection of the claims have been considered but are not persuasive.
Applicant argues:
Incorporation of allowable subject matter of claim 8 overcomes the 101 rejection.
The Office asserts that claim 8 has not been incorporated into the independent claims. Claim 8 also includes claim 4 and the limitations of claim 8 have not been included in the independent claims because claim 8 was amended and the independent claims merely include certain elements of claim 8 but not claim 8 as it was previously written.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112(a):
(a) IN GENERAL.—The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor or joint inventor of carrying out the invention.
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112:
The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
Claims 1, 11 rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), first paragraph, as failing to comply with the written description requirement. The claim(s) contains subject matter which was not described in the specification in such a way as to reasonably convey to one skilled in the relevant art that the inventor or a joint inventor, or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the inventor(s), at the time the application was filed, had possession of the claimed invention.
The claims recite “normalize the at least one first identifier match” however, the specification does not disclose this limitation. The specification at 0004-0006 discloses the identifier match but does not disclose normalizing. The specification at 0114-0120 discloses normalizing but does not disclose the identifier match in that context.
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(s) 1-8, 11-17 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more. The claim(s) recite(s):
1. A system auto-populating an electronic transaction process, the system comprising:
at least one processor; and
a memory storing instructions which when executed by the at least one processor configure the processor to:
scan a digital bill document with an optical character recognition process and identify, from a plurality of optical character recognition (OCR) generated text blocks, a potential logo text block, the identifying including:
sorting the plurality of text blocks based on an OCR detected height of each of the plurality of text blocks;
clustering the sorted plurality of text blocks into clusters of text blocks based on the OCR detected heights, each of the clusters including at least one text block; and
identifying one of the clusters of text blocks having a statistically larger height and lower frequency as a cluster of one or more potential logo text blocks; and:
compare at least one of the potential logo text blocks in the identified cluster with a set of stored payee identifiers to obtain at least one first identifier match;
normalize the at least one first identifier match;
populate an input field associated with the electronic transaction process with one of the at least one normalized first identifier match;
upon receiving confirmation or selection of one of the at least one normalized first identifier match for the input field, extract a feature vector associated with the confirmed or selected identifier match; and
train a multiclass identification model with the extracted feature vector.
The underlined portions of the claim recite certain methods of organizing human activity, commercial interactions including business activities because the claims are directed to filtering content as in Bascom.
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because the additional elements, such as the system, digital documents, OCR technology, clustering algorithm and electronic transaction process merely limit the abstract to a particular field. The upon and train limitations are insignificant extrasolution activity since they do not meaningfully limit the process of auto-populating an electronic transaction.
The claim(s) does/do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because the claims merely. The insignificant extrasolution activity is well-understood, routine and conventional per the prior art of Jeon; [0018] In one embodiment, the machine learning module 230 retrieves, from the training data store 220, one or more vectors (e.g., the difference vector, profile vector, and/or behavior) as features (i.e., feature vectors) to train the content prediction model 240 using machine learning techniques known to one skilled in the art.
The dependent claims merely narrow the abstract idea and as a whole and in combination comprise the abstract idea and generic system elements.
Conclusion
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). 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 WILLIAM E RANKINS whose telephone number is (571)270-3465. The examiner can normally be reached on 9-530 M-F.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Bennett Sigmond can be reached on 303-297-4411. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/WILLIAM E RANKINS/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3694