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 .
Applicant's Response
In Applicant's Response dated 9/23/2025, Applicant amended the Claims and argued against all objections and rejections set forth in the previous Office Action.
All objections and rejections not reproduced below are withdrawn.
The rejection of the Claims under 35 U.S.C. 101 previously set forth are withdrawn.
The prior art rejections of the Claims under 35 U.S.C. 103 previously set forth are withdrawn.
The examiner appreciates the applicant noting where the support for the amendments are described in the specification.
The Application was filed on 9/20/2023, with priority to JP 2022-151570 Filing Date 09/22/2022.
Claim(s) 1-19 are pending for examination. Claim(s) 1, 10, 13, 14, 16 is/are independent claim(s).
Claim Objections
Claim 9 objected to because of the following informalities:
The recited “the fourth step” of Claim 9 lacks antecedent basis, “fourth step” was removed from claim 1. Appropriate correction is required.
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.
Claim(s) 1-12, 14-17 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Turkkan; Omer Anil et al. US Pub. No. 2020/0302018 (Turkkan) in view of Trotter; Paul Stewart US Pub. No. 20100100817 (Trotter) in view of Oktay; Ozan et al. US Pub. No. 2025/0173613 (Oktay).
Claim 1:
Turkkan teaches:
A method for supporting document preparation [¶ 0124] (document creation and management), comprising a step of:
receiving first document data and second document data [¶ 0070] (receive data);
dividing the first document data into a plurality of first blocks [¶ 0004-05, 152, 195] (partition into segment);
dividing the second document data into a plurality of second blocks;
determining a plurality of first combinations each including corresponding first and second blocks [¶ 0004-05, 152, 195] (partition into segment);
…
receiving, as a first designated block, any one of the plurality of first blocks included in the second combinations;
receiving, as a second designated block, the second block corresponding to the first designated block [¶ 0004-05, 152, 195] (partition into segment) [¶ 0140-148, 161-164] (weighted sum for text similarity);
Turkkan does not appear to explicitly disclose “showing”.
However, the disclosure of Trotter teaches:
showing one or more second combinations with a difference between the corresponding first and second blocks, of the plurality of first combinations [¶ 0064-65] (displayed list of paragraphs displays them in order of similarity (85%, 73%, etc.) at 202 and may indicate which of them exists as an equivalent paragraph in a different language );
…
showing, of the first combinations, … [¶ 0064-65] (displayed list of paragraphs displays them in order of similarity (85%, 73%, etc.) at 202 and may indicate which of them exists as an equivalent paragraph in a different language) [¶ 0076] (a difference is a contradiction); …
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the method of section similarity in Turkkan and the method of displaying differences in Trotter, with a reasonable expectation of success.
The motivation for doing so would have been the use of known technique to improve similar devices (methods, or products) in the same way; (See KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 US 398, 82 USPQ2d 1385, 1396 (U.S. 2007) and MPEP § 2143(D)).
The know technique of user displays in Trotter could be applied to the determined similarity in Turkkan. Turkkan and Trotter are similar devices because both analyze documents. One of ordinary skill in the art would have recognized that applying the known technique would improve the similar devices and resulted in an improved system, with a reasonable expectation of success, for “improves searching performance” [Trotter: ¶ 0043].
Turkkan and Trotter do not appear to explicitly disclose “negative”.
However, the disclosure of Oktay teaches:
… a third combination in which presence or absence of establishment of textual entailment between the first designated block and the first block is different from presence or absence of establishment of textual entailment between the second designated block and the second block [¶ 0171-173] (entailment, i.e. the hypothesis can be inferred from the premise; contradiction, i.e. the hypothesis cannot be inferred from the premise; and neutral, i.e. the inference relation is undetermined) [¶ 0173] (discrimination of contradictions);
wherein the second document data is revised first document data [¶ 0110-114, 118] (versions or iterations of the report, presented on screen in the form of a proposed updated version of the report, e.g. with the amendments shown tracked (marked-up) on the previous version of the report (such as by means of strikethrough, underlining and/or highlighting)) [¶ 0010, 57, 74, 79, 85-86, 96-97, 138, 140] (versions, augmented or translated version of the same medical report, for example translated from one natural language into another (e.g. French to English), or rewritten with different phrasing or language).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the method of section similarity in Turkkan and the method of displaying differences in Trotter and the scoring in Gaur and the method of training machine learning text models in Oktay, with a reasonable expectation of success.
The motivation for doing so would have been the use of known technique to improve similar devices (methods, or products) in the same way; (See KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 US 398, 82 USPQ2d 1385, 1396 (U.S. 2007) and MPEP § 2143(D)).
The know technique of entailment in Oktay could be applied to the user displays in Trotter and the determined similarity in Turkkan. Turkkan, Oktay and Trotter are similar devices because each use machine learning to analyze documents, as in Turkkan, or display the documents to the user as in Trotter. One of ordinary skill in the art would have recognized that applying the known technique would improve the similar devices and resulted in an improved system, with a reasonable expectation of success, “to improve the quality” and “for the improvements in efficiency” [Oktay: ¶ 0003, 06-07, 15, 30-31, 67, 88].
Claim 2:
Turkkan teaches:
The method for supporting document preparation according to claim 1,
wherein, whether or not textual entailment is established between the first designated block and the first block having a value representing a strength of a relation with the first designated block that is higher than or equal to a reference value, of the plurality of first blocks [¶ 0004-05, 152, 195] (partition into segment) [¶ 0140-148, 161-164] (weighted sum for text similarity) [¶ 0011] (threshold).
Oktay teaches: [¶ 0099, 138-140, 170, 177] (threshold similarity).
Claim 3:
Turkkan teaches:
The method for supporting document preparation according to claim 1, wherein in the fourth step, a value representing a strength of a relation between the first block included in the third combination and the first designated block is shown, as well as the third combination [¶ 0004-05, 152, 195] (partition into segment) [¶ 0140-148, 161-164] (weighted sum for text similarity).
Trotter teaches: [¶ 0064-65] (displayed list of paragraphs displays them in order of similarity (85%, 73%, etc.) at 202 and may indicate which of them exists as an equivalent paragraph in a different language).
Claim 4:
Oktay teaches:
The method for supporting document preparation according to claim 1, further comprising a step of:
calculating a first determination value of each of first blocks other than the first designated block, regarding presence or absence of establishment of textual entailment with the first designated block [¶ 0099, 138-140, 170, 177] (threshold similarity) [¶ 0075, 87, 99, 133, 138-140, 161, 170, 173-174] (similarity gap, distance metric (which could also be called a similarity metric) quantifies the similarity or different between two samples or instances. The distance metric could be e.g. the cosine similarity or mean square distance); and
calculating a second determination value of each of second blocks other than
the second designated block, regarding presence or absence of establishment of textual entailment with the second designated block [¶ 0171-173] (entailment, i.e. the hypothesis can be inferred from the premise; contradiction, i.e. the hypothesis cannot be inferred from the premise; and neutral, i.e. the inference relation is undetermined), wherein the first determination value and the second determination value are each determined in a numerical range including both negative and positive values [¶ 0170] (compute the cosine similarity between a projected phrase embedding t and each element of the local image representation V, resulting in a grid of scores between [−1, 1]), and
wherein, of the first combinations, the third combination is a combination in which a product of the first determination value and the second determination value is a negative value [¶ 0170] (compute the cosine similarity between a projected phrase embedding t and each element of the local image representation V, resulting in a grid of scores between [−1, 1]).
Claim 5:
Trotter teaches:
The method for supporting document preparation according to claim 1,
wherein a difference in text between the corresponding first and second blocks is colored and shown [¶ 0070-78] (color indicators).
Claim 6:
Turkkan teaches:
The method for supporting document preparation according to claim 1,
wherein similarities between the plurality of first blocks and the plurality of second blocks are calculated, and the first combinations and the second combinations are both determined on the basis of the similarities [¶ 0004-05, 152, 195] (partition into segment) [¶ 0140-148, 161-164] (weighted sum for text similarity).
Trotter teaches: [¶ 0064-65] (displayed list of paragraphs displays them in order of similarity (85%, 73%, etc.) at 202 and may indicate which of them exists as an equivalent paragraph in a different language).
Oktay teaches: [¶ 0099, 138-140, 170, 177] (threshold similarity) [¶ 0075, 87, 99, 133, 138-140, 161, 170, 173-174] (similarity gap, distance metric (which could also be called a similarity metric) quantifies the similarity or different between two samples or instances. The distance metric could be e.g. the cosine similarity or mean square distance).
Claim 7:
Turkkan teaches:
The method for supporting document preparation according to claim 6,
wherein distributed representations of the plurality of first blocks and distributed representations of the plurality of second blocks are obtained and the
distributed representations of the plurality of first blocks are compared with the distributed representations of the plurality of second blocks to calculate the similarities [¶ 0004-05, 152, 195] (partition into segment) [¶ 0140-148, 161-164] (weighted sum for text similarity is distributed).
Trotter teaches: [¶ 0064-65] (displayed list of paragraphs displays them in order of similarity (85%, 73%, etc.) at 202 and may indicate which of them exists as an equivalent paragraph in a different language, percent is “distributed”).
Oktay teaches: [¶ 0099, 138-140, 170, 177] (threshold similarity) [¶ 0075, 87, 99, 133, 138-140, 161, 170, 173-174] (similarity gap, distance metric (which could also be called a similarity metric) quantifies the similarity or different between two samples or instances. The distance metric could be e.g. the cosine similarity or mean square distance).
Claim 8:
Trotter teaches:
The method for supporting document preparation according to claim 1,
further comprising a fifth step of receiving editing of text included in the third combination [¶ 0044-47] (edit distance).
Oktay teaches: [¶ 0110-114, 118] (versions or iterations of the report, presented on screen in the form of a proposed updated version of the report, e.g. with the amendments shown tracked (marked-up) on the previous version of the report (such as by means of strikethrough, underlining and/or highlighting)) [¶ 0010, 57, 74, 79, 85-86, 96-97, 138, 140] (versions, augmented or translated version of the same medical report, for example translated from one natural language into another (e.g. French to English), or rewritten with different phrasing or language)
Claim 9:
Oktay teaches:
The method for supporting document preparation according to claim 8,
wherein a discriminator is used in the fourth step [¶ 0173] (discrimination of contradictions), and
wherein after receiving the editing of text, a combination of the first designated block and the first block before editing is used as one piece of learning data having no establishment of textual entailment, and a combination of the first designated block and the first block after editing is used as one piece of learning data having establishment of textual entailment for learning by the discriminator [¶ 0171-173] (entailment, i.e. the hypothesis can be inferred from the premise; contradiction, i.e. the hypothesis cannot be inferred from the premise; and neutral, i.e. the inference relation is undetermined) [¶ 0110-114, 118] (versions or iterations of the report, presented on screen in the form of a proposed updated version of the report, e.g. with the amendments shown tracked (marked-up) on the previous version of the report (such as by means of strikethrough, underlining and/or highlighting)) [¶ 0010, 57, 74, 79, 85-86, 96-97, 138, 140] (versions, augmented or translated version of the same medical report, for example translated from one natural language into another (e.g. French to English), or rewritten with different phrasing or language).
Claims 10-12, 14-17:
Claim(s) 16 is/are substantially similar to claims 1 and is/are rejected using the same art and the same rationale.
Claim(s) 10 and 14 is/are substantially similar to claims 1 and is/are rejected using the same art and the same rationale. Claims 10 and 14 are a broader reworded version of claims 1. Claims 10 and 14 recites “contradiction” which is also taught by Oktay [¶ 0173] (discrimination of contradictions) [¶ 0171-173] (entailment, i.e. the hypothesis can be inferred from the premise; contradiction, i.e. the hypothesis cannot be inferred from the premise; and neutral, i.e. the inference relation is undetermined) as well as “similarity” which is also taught by Oktay [¶ 0099, 138-140, 170, 177] (threshold similarity) [¶ 0075, 87, 99, 133, 138-140, 161, 170, 173-174] (similarity gap, distance metric (which could also be called a similarity metric) quantifies the similarity or different between two samples or instances. The distance metric could be e.g. the cosine similarity or mean square distance) and Turkkan [¶ 0140-148, 161-164] (weighted sum for text similarity) and Trotter [¶ 0064-65] (displayed list of paragraphs displays them in order of similarity (85%, 73%, etc.).
Claim(s) 11 is/are substantially similar to claims 2 and is/are rejected using the same art and the same rationale.
Claim(s) 12 is/are substantially similar to claim 5 and is/are rejected using the same art and the same rationale.
Claim(s) 15 and 17 is/are substantially similar to claim 8 and is/are rejected using the same art and the same rationale.
Claim(s) 18-19 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Turkkan; Omer Anil et al. US Pub. No. 2020/0302018 (Turkkan) in view of Trotter; Paul Stewart US Pub. No. 20100100817 (Trotter) in view of Oktay; Ozan et al. US Pub. No. 2025/0173613 (Oktay) in view of Sackett; Casey et al. US Pub. NO. 2023/0147359 (Sackett).
Claim 18:
Turkkan, Trotter, Oktay do not appear to explicitly disclose “a negative value represents contradiction”.
However, the disclosure of Sackett teaches:
The method for supporting document preparation according to claim 10, further comprising a step of:
calculating a determination value such that a positive value represents no contradiction and a negative value represents contradiction, for each combination [¶ 0035] (a negative entailment indicates that the input phrase is inconsistent with or contradicts the example phrase), and
showing a product of the similarities and a determination value, for each combination [¶ 0032-34, 47-49, 76, 84] (returns a classification output) [¶ 0106] (sending output to display device).
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the method of section similarity in Turkkan and the method of displaying differences in Trotter and the scoring in Gaur and the method of training machine learning text models in Oktay and the method of input classification in Sackett, with a reasonable expectation of success.
The motivation for doing so would have been the use of known technique to improve similar devices (methods, or products) in the same way; (See KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 US 398, 82 USPQ2d 1385, 1396 (U.S. 2007) and MPEP § 2143(D)).
The know technique of entailment classification in Sackett could be applied to the entailment in Oktay and the user displays in Trotter and the determined similarity in Turkkan. Sackett, Turkkan, Oktay and Trotter are similar devices because each use machine learning to analyze documents, as in Turkkan and Oktay, or display the documents to the user as in Trotter. One of ordinary skill in the art would have recognized that applying the known technique would improve the similar devices and resulted in an improved system, with a reasonable expectation of success, they “can be used to improve the entailment comparison datasets of the entailment classifier and/or improve training of the SML classifier” [Sackett: ¶ 0058].
Claim 19:
Sackett teaches:
The method for supporting document preparation according to claim 16,
wherein the processing processor is configured to calculate a determination value such that a positive value represents no contradiction and a negative value represents contradiction, for each combination [¶ 0035] (a negative entailment indicates that the input phrase is inconsistent with or contradicts the example phrase), and
wherein the processing processor is configured to show a product of the similarities and a determination value, for each combination [¶ 0032-34, 47-49, 76, 84] (returns a classification output) [¶ 0106] (sending output to display device).
Claim(s) 13 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over in view of Liu; Xiaodong et al. US 20210142181 (Liu) in view of Sackett; Casey et al. US Pub. No. 2023/0147359 (Sackett).
Claim 13:
Liu teaches:
A method for supporting document preparation, comprising:
receiving document data [¶ 0026] (language input can include words, tokens, sentences, phrases, or other representations of language, this could be “document data”);
dividing the document data into a plurality of blocks [¶ 0027] (separate individual sentences in a given sequence, this could be “dividing”);
calculating similarities between two blocks of the plurality of blocks, for each combination [¶ 0026, 28, 31, 57, 61-63, 99, 119] (compute the similarities between those tokens),
classifying textual entailment between two blocks of the plurality of blocks into entailment, contradiction, and neutral, for each combination [¶ 0032, 61, 99] (labels can indicate whether one input sentence has an entailment relationship, a contradiction relationship, or a neutral relationship with respect to the other input sentence);
… , and
showing a product of the similarities and a determination value, for each combination [¶ 0031] (outputting a real-valued similarity score indicating the semantic similarity of the two sentences, outputting could be “showing”) [¶ 0057] (these task-specific layers can output a single sentence classification output, a pairwise text similarity output, a pairwise text classification output, and/or a relevance score output).
Liu does not appear to explicitly disclose “a negative value represents contradiction”.
However, the disclosure of Sackett teaches:
… calculating a determination value such that a positive value represents no contradiction and a negative value represents contradiction, for each combination [¶ 0035] (a negative entailment indicates that the input phrase is inconsistent with or contradicts the example phrase);
showing a combination of two blocks whose textual entailment is classified as contradiction [¶ 0032-34, 47-49, 76, 84] (returns a classification output) [¶ 0106] (sending output to display device); and …
It would have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to combine the method of training machine learning models in Liu and the method of input classification in Sackett, with a reasonable expectation of success.
The motivation for doing so would have been the use of known technique to improve similar devices (methods, or products) in the same way; (See KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 US 398, 82 USPQ2d 1385, 1396 (U.S. 2007) and MPEP § 2143(D)).
The know technique of entailment classification in Sackett could be applied to the entailment for machine learning and similarity in Liu. Sackett and Liu are similar devices because each use machine learning and calculate entailment. One of ordinary skill in the art would have recognized that applying the known technique would improve the similar devices and resulted in an improved system, with a reasonable expectation of success, they “can be used to improve the entailment comparison datasets of the entailment classifier and/or improve training of the SML classifier” [Sackett: ¶ 0058].
Prior Art
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Please See PTO-892: Notice of References Cited.
Dimino; Gerlando et al. US 20230109483 (Dimino) negative, distance metrics: they may take on large values for similar objects and either zero or a negative value for very dissimilar objects; determining a respective first similarity value between the respective first fragment and the respective second fragment.
Hashimoto; Kazuma et al. US 20180121799 teaches: Semantic Relatedness; entailment, contradiction, and neutral. entailment vector, chunking.
Kapadia; Yogen US 20150012528 teaches: Fig. 5, a paragraph change threshold, a sentence change threshold, a section change threshold, etc.) that can be associated with a degree of difference between a portion of the first file 404 and a corresponding portion of one of the second files.
CHOSA; Katsuki et al. US 20240012996 teaches: calculating a similarity score between sentences of two documents, text entailment, discriminative.
Zernik, Uri US 20050010863 Fig. 15, output of various summary similarity measures on a section-by-section basis
Huppe; Sébastien et al. US 20230013179 – similarity score between content blocks.
Mikami; Takashi et al. US 20210056304 teaches: comparison table representing a degree of difference between the input information and the document information for each constituent unit on the basis of the score.
Kamijoh; Kohichi et al. US 20210271821 discloses 1 to -1 similarity, a hypothesis and an opinion, outputs the score, i.e., similarity between these two sentences between the range of −1 and 1, output the score of the similarity between a hypothesis and an opinion.
Qu; Jin et al. US 20220366893 teaches: Discriminative nearest neighbor; relationship can be binary, e.g., entailment or non-entailment, or ternary (e.g., entailment, contradiction, and neutral), negative or non-entailment.
Citations to Prior Art
A reference to specific paragraphs, columns, pages, or figures in a cited prior art reference is not limited to preferred embodiments or any specific examples. It is well settled that a prior art reference, in its entirety, must be considered for all that it expressly teaches and fairly suggests to one having ordinary skill in the art. Stated differently, a prior art disclosure reading on a limitation of Applicant's claim cannot be ignored on the ground that other embodiments disclosed were instead cited. Therefore, the Examiner's citation to a specific portion of a single prior art reference is not intended to exclusively dictate, but rather, to demonstrate an exemplary disclosure commensurate with the specific limitations being addressed. In re Heck, 699 F.2d 1331, 1332-33,216 USPQ 1038, 1039 (Fed. Cir. 1983) (quoting In re Lemelson, 397 F.2d 1006, 1009, 158 USPQ 275, 277 (CCPA 1968". In re: Upsher-Smith Labs. v. Pamlab, LLC, 412 F.3d 1319, 1323,75 USPQ2d 1213,1215 (Fed. Cir. 2005); In re Fritch, 972 F.2d 1260, 1264,23 USPQ2d 1780, 1782 (Fed. Cir. 1992); Merck & Co. v. Biocraft Labs., Inc., 874 F.2d 804, 807,10 USPQ2d 1843, 1846 (Fed. Cir. 1989); In re Fracalossi, 681 F.2d 792,794 n.1, 215 USPQ 569, 570 n.1 (CCPA 1982); In re Lamberti, 545 F.2d 747, 750, 192 USPQ 278, 280 (CCPA 1976); In re Bozek, 416 F.2d 1385,1390,163 USPQ 545, 549 (CCPA 1969).
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments with respect to claim(s) 1-19 have been considered but are moot because the new ground of rejection does not rely on any reference applied in the prior rejection of record for any teaching or matter specifically challenged in the argument.
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.
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