NON-FINAL REJECTION, FIRST DETAILED ACTION
Status of Prosecution
The present application, 18/416,163 filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
The application was filed on January 18, 2024 in the Office and claims priority to provisional application 63/439,617 filed on Jan. 18, 2023.
Claims 1-20 are pending and all are rejected. Claims 1, 13 and 20 are independent.
Status of the Claims
Claims 1, 13 and 20 are rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over the claims noted below of Reference Application 18/393,313(issued as US Patent 12,488,010).
Claims 8 and 18 are rejected under 35 USC § 112(b) for being indefinite.
Drawings are objected to.
Claims 1, 2, 4-6 and 10-16 are rejected under 35 USC. § 103 as being unpatentable over Nam et al.(“Nam”) Korean Patent Application Publication KR20210000592A published on Jan. 6, 2021 in view of non-patent literature, Jiang et al. (“Jiang”), “UniKGQA: Unified Retrieval and Reasoning for Solving Multi-hop Question Answering Over Knowledge Graph published in 2022.
Claims 3 and 20 are rejected under 35 USC. § 103 as being unpatentable over Nam in view of Jiang and in further view of Dave et al. (“Dave”), United States Patent Application Publication 2024/0054326 published on Feb. 15, 2024.
Claims 7, 9, 17 and 19 are rejected under 35 USC. § 103 as being unpatentable over Nam in view of Jiang and in further view of Mensink et al. (“Mensink”) United States Patent US 2012/0054130 published on Mar. 1, 2012 and in further view of Dave et al. (“Dave”), United States Patent Application Publication 2024/0054326 published on Feb. 15, 2024.
Double Patenting
The nonstatutory double patenting rejection is based on a judicially created doctrine grounded in public policy (a policy reflected in the statute) so as to prevent the unjustified or improper timewise extension of the “right to exclude” granted by a patent and to prevent possible harassment by multiple assignees. A nonstatutory double patenting rejection is appropriate where the conflicting claims are not identical, but at least one examined application claim is not patentably distinct from the reference claim(s) because the examined application claim is either anticipated by, or would have been obvious over, the reference claim(s). See, e.g., In re Berg, 140 F.3d 1428, 46 USPQ2d 1226 (Fed. Cir. 1998); In re Goodman, 11 F.3d 1046, 29 USPQ2d 2010 (Fed. Cir. 1993); In re Longi, 759 F.2d 887, 225 USPQ 645 (Fed. Cir. 1985); In re Van Ornum, 686 F.2d 937, 214 USPQ 761 (CCPA 1982); In re Vogel, 422 F.2d 438, 164 USPQ 619 (CCPA 1970); In re Thorington, 418 F.2d 528, 163 USPQ 644 (CCPA 1969).
A timely filed terminal disclaimer in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(c) or 1.321(d) may be used to overcome an actual or provisional rejection based on nonstatutory double patenting provided the reference application or patent either is shown to be commonly owned with the examined application, or claims an invention made as a result of activities undertaken within the scope of a joint research agreement. See MPEP § 717.02 for applications subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA as explained in MPEP § 2159. See MPEP § 2146 et seq. for applications not subject to examination under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA . A terminal disclaimer must be signed in compliance with 37 CFR 1.321(b).
The filing of a terminal disclaimer by itself is not a complete reply to a nonstatutory double patenting (NSDP) rejection. A complete reply requires that the terminal disclaimer be accompanied by a reply requesting reconsideration of the prior Office action. Even where the NSDP rejection is provisional the reply must be complete. See MPEP § 804, subsection I.B.1. For a reply to a non-final Office action, see 37 CFR 1.111(a). For a reply to final Office action, see 37 CFR 1.113(c). A request for reconsideration while not provided for in 37 CFR 1.113(c) may be filed after final for consideration. See MPEP §§ 706.07(e) and 714.13.
The USPTO Internet website contains terminal disclaimer forms which may be used. Please visit www.uspto.gov/patent/patents-forms. The actual filing date of the application in which the form is filed determines what form (e.g., PTO/SB/25, PTO/SB/26, PTO/AIA /25, or PTO/AIA /26) should be used. A web-based eTerminal Disclaimer may be filled out completely online using web-screens. An eTerminal Disclaimer that meets all requirements is auto-processed and approved immediately upon submission. For more information about eTerminal Disclaimers, refer to www.uspto.gov/patents/apply/applying-online/eterminal-disclaimer.
Claims 1 and 13 are rejected on the ground of nonstatutory double patenting as being unpatentable over the claims noted below of Reference Application 18/393,313
(issued as US Patent 12,488,010). Although the claims at issue are not identical, they are not patentably distinct from each other because:
Instant Application – 18/416,163
Reference Application – 18/393,313
(issued as US Patent 12,488,010)
1. A method for controlling an artificial intelligence (AI) device, the method comprising:
obtaining, via a processor in the AI device, a knowledge base including a plurality of nodes;
flattening, via the processor, the knowledge base by transforming the knowledge base into a first plurality of documents to form a first index, each of the first plurality of documents identifying a node within the knowledge base;
receiving, via the processor, a user query;
retrieving, via the processor, a subset of documents based on the first plurality of documents and the user query; and
performing, via the processor, a task related to knowledge base question answering (KBQA) based on the subset of documents.
1. A computer-implemented method for controlling an artificial intelligence (AI) device, the method comprising:
obtaining, via a processor in the AI device, a knowledge base including a plurality of nodes;
flattening, via the processor, the knowledge base by transforming the knowledge base into a first plurality of documents, the first plurality of documents identifying nodes within the knowledge base;
receiving, via the processor, a user query;
performing, via the processor, matching based on the user query and the first plurality of documents to generate a ranked results list;
reducing, via the processor, the ranked results list based on a reducing operation to generate a reduced list; and outputting, via the processor, linked entities based on the reduced list, wherein the transforming the knowledge base into the first plurality of documents includes:
selecting a node within the knowledge base, extracting a name of the node and at least one of an incoming link of the node and an outgoing link of the node,creating, for the node, a separate document including the name of the node and at least one of the incoming link of the node and the outgoing link of the node, and adding the separate document to the first plurality of documents, wherein the knowledge base includes multiple hop-paths, and the knowledge base includes triplets in which each of the triplets represents a single hop path within the knowledge base.
3. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising: transmitting the linked entities and the user query to a knowledge base question and answer (KBQA) system for generating an answer based on the user query and the linked entities.
Claims 13 and 20 are similarly rejected.
Drawing Objection
Figs. 7, 8, 10A-C are objected to. The drawings are not of sufficient quality to permit examination. Accordingly, replacement drawing sheets in compliance with 37 CFR 1.121(d) are required in reply to this Office action. The replacement sheet(s) should be labeled “Replacement Sheet” in the page header (as per 37 CFR 1.84(c)) so as not to obstruct any portion of the drawing figures. If the changes are not accepted by the examiner, the applicant will be notified and informed of any required corrective action in the next Office action.
Applicant is given a shortened statutory period of TWO (2) MONTHS to submit new drawings in compliance with 37 CFR 1.81. Extensions of time may be obtained under the provisions of 37 CFR 1.136(a) but in no case can any extension carry the date for reply to this letter beyond the maximum period of SIX MONTHS set by statute (35 U.S.C. 133). Failure to timely submit replacement drawing sheets will result in ABANDONMENT of the application.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
Claims 8 and 18 are rejected under 35 USC § 112(b) for being indefinite. Claim 6 recites in part, “wherein the retrieving includes: performing matching based on the user query and the first plurality of documents to retrieve top K matching documents, where K is a positive integer, wherein the subset of documents is based on the top K matching documents.” Claim 8 recites in part, “performing matching based on the user query and the second plurality of documents to retrieve top N matching documents, where N is a positive integer less than K, wherein the subset of documents is based on the top N matching documents.” Claim 8 depends from claim 6 via claim 7 recites how the subset of documents is based on different matching. The two claim elements appear to be in conflict with each other. Correction and clarification is requested. Claim 18 is similarly rejected.
No prior art rejection is made. See MPEP 2173.06(II) (“As stated in In re Steele, 305 F.2d 859, 134 USPQ 292 (CCPA 1962), a rejection under 35 U.S.C. 103 should not be based on considerable speculation about the meaning of terms employed in a claim or assumptions that must be made as to the scope of the claims.”).
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 of this title, 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.
A.
Claims 1, 2, 4-6 and 10-16 are rejected under 35 USC. § 103 as being unpatentable over Nam et al.(“Nam”) Korean Patent Application Publication KR20210000592A published on Jan. 6, 2021 in view of non-patent literature, Jiang et al. (“Jiang”), “UniKGQA: Unified Retrieval and Reasoning for Solving Multi-hop Question Answering Over Knowledge Graph published in 2022.
As to Claim 1, Nam teaches: A method for controlling an artificial intelligence (AI) device, the method comprising:
obtaining, via a processor in the AI device, a knowledge base including a plurality of nodes (Nam: Fig. 1, par. 0042, a knowledge graph [100](i.e. a knowledge base) has nodes with each node a unit information in a triple form – object-property-value) ;
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flattening, via the processor, the knowledge base by transforming the knowledge base into a first plurality of documents to form a first index, each of the first plurality of documents identifying a node within the knowledge base (Nam: Fig. 2, pars. 0052-56, an index document is created corresponding to each entity in the knowledge graph);
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receiving, via the processor, a user query (Nam: par. 0080, at ste[p [510] of a process, a natural language query may be received);
retrieving, via the processor, a subset of documents based on the first plurality of documents and the user query (Nam: par. 0081, index documents corresponding to the query are obtained and a value may be extracted).
Nam may not explicitly teach: performing, via the processor, a task related to knowledge base question answering (KBQA) based on the subset of documents.
Jiang teaches in general concepts related to multi-hop question answering over Knowledge Graph (KGQA) which aims to find answer entities that are multiple hops away from a natural language question on a large-scale Knowledge Graph (KG) (Jiang: Abstract). Specifically, Jiang teaches that answer generation for the query may be performed using a semantic module and a matching information propagation module architecture (Jiang: Fig. 2, p. 4; pp. 1-2, the two stages of retrieval and reasoning are optimized by use of these two modules working together).
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It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at a time before the effective filing date of the invention to have modified the Nam device and methods by including computer instructions to allow for tasks related to knowledge base question answering to be performed on the resulting answers with the use of the two modules as taught and disclosed by Jiang. Such a person would have been motivated to do so with a reasonable expectation of success to do so to improve performance (Jiang: pp. 1-2, the two stages of retrieval and reasoning are optimized by use of these two modules working together.)
As to Claim 2, Nam and Jiang teach the limitations of claim 1.
Jiang further teaches: wherein the task includes at least one of answer generation(Jiang: Abstract, answer generation), semantic parsing (Jiang: Fig. 2, semantic module), and entity linking (Jiang: sec. 2, p. 3, in Fig. 1(a) topic entities are marked and linked to answer entities).
As to Claim 4, Nam and Jiang teach the limitations of claim 1.
Nam and Jiang further teaches: augmenting the first index of the first plurality of documents by applying a label field to each of the first plurality of documents(Nam: pars. 0054-56, common attribute information [210] (field) may be created; the index includes attribute information including the attribute name, and the value;), wherein each of the first plurality of documents includes at least four pieces of information corresponding to a node name, an in/outgoing link name (Jiang: Sec. 2, the triples representing the knowledge graph include information of the entity set and the relation set, a predicate. Examiner notes the relation information deals with the edge or link between the entities), a name of other node (Jiang’s triple would include the “object” of the “subject, predicate object”), and the label field (Nam’s common attribute information include the name of the field).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at a time before the effective filing date of the invention to have further modified the Nam-Jiang device and methods by including computer instructions to allow for the implementation of the index with the triples including the information from the knowledge graph, which includes the pieces of information. Such a person would have been motivated to do so with a reasonable expectation of success to do so to utilize the knowledge graph triple information in the reduced form effectively.
As to Claim 5, Nam and Jiang teach the limitations of claim 4.
Nam further teaches: wherein the label field indicates at least one of a category, a topic, a person, a place, a thing, and an attribute (Nam: pars. 0060-61, common attribute may include, type, category, name, etc.).
As to Claim 6, Nam and Jiang teach the limitations of claim 1.
Jiang further teaches: wherein the retrieving includes: performing matching based on the user query and the first plurality of documents to retrieve top K matching documents, where K is a positive integer, wherein the subset of documents is based on the top K matching documents (Nam: pars. 0054-56, common attribute information [210] (field) may be created; the index includes attribute information including the attribute name, and the value; Jiang: p. 5, “We further utilize it to retrieve the subgraph for the given question q, by selecting the top-K ranked nodes according to their match scores.”)
As to Claim 10, Nam and Jiang teach the limitations of claim 1.
Nam and Jiang further teaches: wherein each document among the first plurality of documents includes a tuple having an entity name of a node within the knowledge base, a name of an incoming link or an outgoing link associated with the node (Jiang: Sec. 2, the triples representing the knowledge graph include information of the entity set and the relation set, a predicate. Examiner notes the relation information deals with the edge or link between the entities).
As to Claim 11, Nam and Jiang teach the limitations of claim 1.
Nam further teaches: wherein the knowledge base includes at least one directed acyclic graph (Nam Fig. 1, shows an acyclic graph).
As to Claim 12, Nam and Jiang teach the limitations of claim 1.
Nam further teaches: wherein the subset of documents are determined without using any large language model (LLM).
As to Claim 13, it is rejected for similar reasons as claim 1. Nam further teaches a memory and controller (Nam: par. 0086).
As to Claim 14, it is rejected for similar reasons as claim 2.
As to Claim 15, it is rejected for similar reasons as claim 4.
As to Claim 16, it is rejected for similar reasons as claim 6.
B.
Claims 3 and 20 are rejected under 35 USC. § 103 as being unpatentable over Nam et al.(“Nam”) Korean Patent Application Publication KR20210000592A published on Jan. 6, 2021 in view of non-patent literature, Jiang et al. (“Jiang”), “UniKGQA: Unified Retrieval and Reasoning for Solving Multi-hop Question Answering Over Knowledge Graph published in 2022 and in further view of Dave et al. (“Dave”), United States Patent Application Publication 2024/0054326 published on Feb. 15, 2024.
As to Claim 3, Nam and Jiang teach the limitations of claim 1.
Jiang further teaches: wherein each of the first plurality of documents including at least three pieces of information corresponding to a node name, an in/outgoing link name, and a name of other node (Jiang: Sec. 2, the triples representing the knowledge graph include information of the entity set and the relation set, a predicate. Examiner notes the relation information deals with the edge or link between the entities).
Nam and Jiang may not explicitly teach: wherein the first plurality of documents are 1-hop documents.
Dave teaches in general concepts related to learning classifiers for annotating a document with predicted labels under extreme classification when there are over a million labels, using a joint graph including documents and labels as nodes (Dave: Abstract). Specifically, Dave teaches that the graph representation of documents may be generated using one-hop or two or three-hop document representations (Dave: par. 0072, generate operation [608]).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at a time before the effective filing date of the invention to have modified the Nam-Jiang device and methods by including computer instructions to implement the document representation as one-hop document representations as taught and disclosed by Dave. Such a person would have been motivated to do so with a reasonable expectation of success to do so to allow for the flattening of the document by using a graph convolution technique based on the neighboring nodes for efficiently representing the documents in a way to traverse them with best traverses (Dave: par. 0074).
As to Claim 20, Nam teaches: A method for controlling an artificial intelligence (AI) device, the method comprising:
obtaining, via a processor in the AI device, a knowledge base including a plurality of nodes(Nam: Fig. 1, par. 0042, a knowledge graph [100](i.e. a knowledge base) has nodes with each node a unit information in a triple form – object-property-value) ;;
flattening, via the processor, the knowledge base by transforming the knowledge base into a first plurality of documents to form a first index (Nam: Fig. 2, pars. 0052-56, an index document is created corresponding to each entity in the knowledge graph);
receiving, via the processor, a user query (Nam: par. 0080, at ste[p [510] of a process, a natural language query may be received);
retrieving, via the processor, a subset of documents based on the first plurality of documents and the user query (Nam: par. 0081, index documents corresponding to the query are obtained and a value may be extracted).
Nam may not explicitly teach: outputting, via the processor, the subset of documents, each of the first plurality of documents including at least three pieces of information corresponding to a node name, an in/outgoing link name, a name of other node.
Jiang teaches in general concepts related to multi-hop question answering over Knowledge Graph (KGQA) which aims to find answer entities that are multiple hops away from a natural language question on a large-scale Knowledge Graph (KG) (Jiang: Abstract). Specifically, Jiang teaches that answer generation for the query may be performed using a semantic module and a matching information propagation module architecture (Jiang: Fig. 2, p. 4; pp. 1-2, the two stages of retrieval and reasoning are optimized by use of these two modules working together).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at a time before the effective filing date of the invention to have modified the Nam device and methods by including computer instructions to allow for tasks related to knowledge base question answering to be performed on the resulting answers with the use of the two modules as taught and disclosed by Jiang. Such a person would have been motivated to do so with a reasonable expectation of success to do so to improve performance (Jiang: pp. 1-2, the two stages of retrieval and reasoning are optimized by use of these two modules working together.)
Nam and Jiang may not explicitly teach: outputting, via the processor, the subset of documents, wherein the first plurality of documents are 1-hop documents, each of the first plurality of documents including at least three pieces of information corresponding to a node name, an in/outgoing link name, a name of other node.
Dave teaches in general concepts related to learning classifiers for annotating a document with predicted labels under extreme classification when there are over a million labels, using a joint graph including documents and labels as nodes (Dave: Abstract). Specifically, Dave teaches that the graph representation of documents may be generated using one-hop or two or three-hop document representations (Dave: par. 0072, generate operation [608]).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at a time before the effective filing date of the invention to have modified the Nam-Jiang device and methods by including computer instructions to implement the document representation as one-hop document representations as taught and disclosed by Dave. Such a person would have been motivated to do so with a reasonable expectation of success to do so to allow for the flattening of the document by using a graph convolution technique based on the neighboring nodes for efficiently representing the documents in a way to traverse them with best traverses (Dave: par. 0074).
C.
Claims 7, 9, 17 and 19 are rejected under 35 USC. § 103 as being unpatentable over Nam et al.(“Nam”) Korean Patent Application Publication KR20210000592A published on Jan. 6, 2021 in view of non-patent literature, Jiang et al. (“Jiang”), “UniKGQA: Unified Retrieval and Reasoning for Solving Multi-hop Question Answering Over Knowledge Graph published in 2022 and in further view of Mensink et al. (“Mensink”) United States Patent US 2012/0054130 published on Mar. 1, 2012 and in further view of Dave et al. (“Dave”), United States Patent Application Publication 2024/0054326 published on Feb. 15, 2024.
As to Claim 7, Nam and Jiang teach the limitations of claim 6.
Nam and Jiang may not explicitly teach: wherein the retrieving further includes:
creating a second index of a second plurality of documents based on Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF) by expanding the top K matching documents from the first index including the first plurality of documents,
Mensink teaches in general concepts related to a document relevance scoring function that uses a pseudo-relevance scoring for the weights (Mensink: Abstract). Specifically, Mensink teaches that after an initial query a set of second documents are then considered for a second feedback query using the top-k documents (Mensink: par. 0044, a top-k set of most similar documents returned by a query, a sorted list). PRF may be used in the scoring for the each of the query/document pairs (Mensink: par. 0044).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at a time before the effective filing date of the invention to have modified the Nam-Jiang device and methods by including computer instructions to implement creating a second index in the same manner of Nam-Jiang for the expanded top-K documents with PRF as taught and disclosed by Mensink. Such a person would have been motivated to do so with a reasonable expectation of success to do so to allow for the efficient handling of document retrieval (Mensink: par. 0003).
Nam, Jiang and Mensink may not explicitly teach: wherein the second plurality of documents are 2-hop documents, each of the second plurality of documents including at least five pieces of information corresponding to a node name, an in/outgoing link name, a name of other node, an additional in/outgoing link name, and an additional name of another node.
Dave teaches in general concepts related to learning classifiers for annotating a document with predicted labels under extreme classification when there are over a million labels, using a joint graph including documents and labels as nodes (Dave: Abstract). Specifically, Dave teaches that the graph representation of documents may be generated using one-hop or two or three-hop document representations (Dave: par. 0072, generate operation [608]).
Nam and Jiang as combined earlier further teach the different pieces of information for a plurality of documents.
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art at a time before the effective filing date of the invention to have modified the Nam-Jiang-Mensink device and methods by including computer instructions to implement the document representation as two-hop document representations as taught and disclosed by Dave. Such a person would have been motivated to do so with a reasonable expectation of success to do so to allow for the flattening of the document by using a graph convolution technique based on the neighboring nodes for efficiently representing the documents in a way to traverse them with best traverses (Dave: par. 0074).
As to Claim 9, Nam, Jiang, Mesink and Dave teach the limitations of claim 7.
Nam, Jiang, Mesink and Dave as combined further teach: augmenting the second index of the second plurality of documents by applying a label field to each of the second plurality of documents, wherein each of the second plurality of documents includes at least six pieces of information corresponding to a node name, an in/outgoing link name, a name of other node, an additional in/outgoing link name, an additional name of another node, and the label field (Examiner asserts that the additional label field is contemplated by Nam).
As to Claim 17, it is rejected for similar reasons as claim 7.
As to Claim 19, it is rejected for similar reasons as claim 9.
Conclusion
Prior art not relied upon, but deemed relevant to Applicant’s disclosure:
Singaraju et al., US 2020/0057946, (Feb. 20, 2020) (teaching constructing a customized knowledge graph);
Wu et al., US 9,792,530 (Oct. 17, 2017) (teaching generating and using a knowledge base for image classification);
Li et al., US 2017/0140059 (May 18, 2017) (discussing organizing search results);
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JAMES T TSAI whose telephone number is (571)270-3916. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 8-5 Eastern.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Viker Lamardo can be reached at 571-270-5871. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/JAMES T TSAI/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2147
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