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
This non-final office action is in response to the Application filed on 11/27/2023, which is a 371 of PCT/CN2022/114131 Filing Date 08/23/2022 with priority to CN 202111124159.0 Filing Date 09/24/2021
Claim(s) 1-16, 20-23 are pending for examination. Claim(s) 1, 20, 23 is/are independent claim(s). Claims 1-16, 20-23 are subject to a requirement for unity of invention and election of species. Claims 1-5, 2-23 were elected with traverse.
Election/Restrictions
REQUIREMENT FOR UNITY OF INVENTION
As provided in 37 CFR 1.475(a), a national stage application shall relate to one invention only or to a group of inventions so linked as to form a single general inventive concept (“requirement of unity of invention”). Where a group of inventions is claimed in a national stage application, the requirement of unity of invention shall be fulfilled only when there is a technical relationship among those inventions involving one or more of the same or corresponding special technical features. The expression “special technical features” shall mean those technical features that define a contribution which each of the claimed inventions, considered as a whole, makes over the prior art.
The determination whether a group of inventions is so linked as to form a single general inventive concept shall be made without regard to whether the inventions are claimed in separate claims or as alternatives within a single claim. See 37 CFR 1.475(e).
When Claims Are Directed to Multiple Categories of Inventions:
As provided in 37 CFR 1.475 (b), a national stage application containing claims to different categories of invention will be considered to have unity of invention if the claims are drawn only to one of the following combinations of categories:
(1) A product and a process specially adapted for the manufacture of said product; or
(2) A product and a process of use of said product; or
(3) A product, a process specially adapted for the manufacture of the said product, and a use of the said product; or
(4) A process and an apparatus or means specifically designed for carrying out the said process; or
(5) A product, a process specially adapted for the manufacture of the said product, and an apparatus or means specifically designed for carrying out the said process.
Otherwise, unity of invention might not be present. See 37 CFR 1.475 (c).
Restriction is required under 35 U.S.C. 121 and 372.
This application contains the following inventions or groups of inventions which are not so linked as to form a single general inventive concept under PCT Rule 13.1.
In accordance with 37 CFR 1.499, applicant is required, in reply to this action, to elect a single invention to which the claims must be restricted.
Group I, claim(s) 1-5, 20-23, drawn to different levels of review for documents, lowest, middle, highest, see Fig. 1, Class G06F 40/166 - Editing, e.g. inserting or deleting.
Group II, claim(s) 1, 6-11, 20, 23, drawn to popup windows on mobile device , see Figs. 2-9, Class G06F3/04886 - by partitioning the display area of the touch-screen or the surface of the digitizing tablet into independently controllable areas, e.g. virtual keyboards or menus.
Group III, claim(s) 1, 12-16, 20, 23, drawn to side by side, split window, on desktop, see Figs. 10-11, Class G06F2203/04803 - Split screen, i.e. subdividing the display area or the window area into separate subareas.
This application contains claims directed to more than one species of the generic invention. These species are deemed to lack unity of invention because they are not so linked as to form a single general inventive concept under PCT Rule 13.1.
The species are as follows:
Species I, drawn to different levels of review for documents, lowest, middle, highest, see Fig. 1.
Species II, drawn to popup windows on mobile device , see Figs. 2-9.
Species III, drawn to side by side, split window, on desktop, see Figs. 10-11.
Applicant is required, in reply to this action, to elect a single species to which the claims shall be restricted if no generic claim is finally held to be allowable. The reply must also identify the claims readable on the elected species, including any claims subsequently added. An argument that a claim is allowable or that all claims are generic is considered non-responsive unless accompanied by an election.
Upon the allowance of a generic claim, applicant will be entitled to consideration of claims to additional species which are written in dependent form or otherwise require all the limitations of an allowed generic claim. Currently, the following claim(s) are generic: 1, 20, 23
The groups of inventions listed above do not relate to a single general inventive concept under PCT Rule 13.1 because, under PCT Rule 13.2, they lack the same or corresponding special technical features for the following reasons:
Groups I, II, III lack unity of invention because the groups do not share the same or corresponding technical feature.
Applicant is reminded that upon the cancelation of claims to a non-elected invention, the inventorship must be corrected in compliance with 37 CFR 1.48(a) if one or more of the currently named inventors is no longer an inventor of at least one claim remaining in the application. A request to correct inventorship under 37 CFR 1.48(a) must be accompanied by an application data sheet in accordance with 37 CFR 1.76 that identifies each inventor by his or her legal name and by the processing fee required under 37 CFR 1.17(i).
During a telephone conversation with Mark Alleman, Reg, No. 42,257, on 1/8/2026 a provisional election was made with traverse to prosecute the invention of Group I, Species I, claims 1-5, 20-23. Affirmation of this election must be made by applicant in replying to this Office action. Claims 6-16 withdrawn from further consideration by the examiner, 37 CFR 1.142(b), as being drawn to a non-elected invention.
Claim Objections
Claim 13 objected to because of the following informalities:
The claim recites “a first trigger operation”, however claim 1 also recites “a first trigger operation”. It is unclear if these are the same element or a different element. 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, 2, 20, 21, 23 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Hoover; Bradley et al. US Pub. No. 20110313757 (Hoover).
Claim 1:
Hoover teaches:
A method for displaying review information, comprising:
displaying to-be-modified text segments of a reviewed text in a first display style in a review result page [¶ 0094, 109-110, 113-114, 119] (Sentences and words for which feedback is available may be highlighted, highlighted is a “display style”, such as shown in the editor as depicted in Fig. 15), and displaying text segments of the reviewed text other than the to-be-modified text segments in a second display style [¶ 0094] (sentences without feedback are not highlighted, see Fig. 15, non-highlighted text could be a “second display style”); and
in response to a first trigger operation on a to-be-modified target text segment of the respective to-be-modified text segments, displaying a target issue introduction and a target review basis corresponding to the to-be-modified target text segment in a predetermined display mode in the review result page [¶ 0097-104] (Figs. 16-20 show an example representation of a card, where in this in this instance is related to a sentence-level mistake, and where a user is presented with a number of elements generated by the text processing engine based on processed text, detected issue, and selected writing genre, user selection of the issue would be a “trigger option”).
Hoover teaches all the elements of the claim, however some of these elements may by in different embodiments and use different terminology, for example highlighting as a “display style” and user selection as a “trigger option”. 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 different embodiments of Hoover and that the difference in terminology is an obvious variant.
The reason, rationale, and motivation for this combination would have been “to improve the quality of computer-based grammar checking” [Hoover: ¶ 0005].
Claim 2:
Hoover teaches:
The method of claim 1, wherein issue types corresponding to the respective to-be-modified text segments and the number of issues for each of the issue types are displayed in the review result page additionally [¶ 0084] (number of occurrences within the text of each of the grammatical rules) [¶ 0091] (reported errors may be grouped into categories for convenient navigation and presented to users as a summary report, such as shown in FIG. 11) [¶ 0092] (processing feedback categories, such as in sidebar links on the right margin of the editor as shown in FIG. 12, FIG. 13 shows feedback instances (possible mistake instances) for each feedback category) [¶ 0093] (wizard-like fashion by clicking the `next` button 1402 on each feedback card as shown in FIG. 14, or jumping to a category of interest by clicking on the corresponding tab on the right margin of the editor).
Claim(s) 3, 22 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Hoover; Bradley et al. US Pub. No. 20110313757 (Hoover) in view of Deutsch; Christopher E. US Pub. No. 2019/0114312 (Deutsch).
Claim 3:
Hoover teaches levels of review: [¶ 0082] (grammatical rules may be of the paragraph, sentence, phrase or word level) [¶ 0091-92, 97, 105, 108] (flag sentences with potential sentence-level errors and words with word-level issues).
Hoover does not appear to explicitly disclose “review basis of a highest level, a review basis of a middle level, and a review basis of a lowest level”.
However, the disclosure of Deutsch teaches:
The method of claim 1, wherein review bases comprise a review basis of a highest level, a review basis of a middle level, and a review basis of a lowest level [¶ 0052] (“Base Level,” “Second Level,” “CEO Level,” and “None”);
wherein the target review basis is a review basis of a lowest level corresponding to the to- be-modified target text segment [¶ 0052-54] (“Base Level” may indicate that the message is edited by a first level writing assistant); and
wherein after displaying a target issue introduction and a target review basis corresponding to the to-be-modified target text segment in a predetermined display mode in the review result page, the method further comprises:
in response to a second trigger operation of a user, displaying the review basis of the middle level and/or the review basis of the highest level corresponding to the target review basis in the review result page [¶ 0006, 15, 47, 52] (plurality of reviewers for the project based on the selected certification level when the selected certification level is higher than a predetermined certification level. Before the message is provided, the message has been reviewed by the selected reviewer based on the selected certification level when the selected certification level is higher than the predetermined certification level).
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 viewing grammar violations in Hoover and the method of document review in Deutsch, 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 review levels in Deutsch could be applied to the document editing in Hoover. Deutsch and Hoover are similar devices because each edit 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, to provide “help with grammar, sentence structure, organization, tone,” [Deutsch: ¶ 0003].
Claim(s) 4 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Hoover; Bradley et al. US Pub. No. 2011/0313757 (Hoover) in view of Luo; Enming et al. US Pat. No. 10,637,826 (Luo).
Claim 4:
Hoover discloses: [¶ 0108] (sorting writing issues by frequency) [¶ 0071, 87, 102, 104, 108] (retrieving relevant information from a writing handbook) [¶ 0082] (grammatical rules may be of the paragraph, sentence, phrase or word level) [¶ 0091-92, 97, 105, 108] (flag sentences with potential sentence-level errors and words with word-level issues).
Hoover does not appear to explicitly disclose “”.
However, the disclosure of Luo teaches:
The method of claim 2, wherein the issue types comprise a typo issue and a violation issue that violates a review basis, and a priority of the violation issue is higher than that of the typo issue [Col. 16, Ln. 33-65] (Based on the assigned weights, the vector analysis module 260 may rank the stored semantic vectors in an order representative of how similar they are to the extracted semantic vector of the test content item, for example prioritizing stored semantic vectors with low distances); and
in accordance with a determination that the to-be-modified target text segment has the typo issue and the violation issue, the displaying a target issue introduction and a target review basis corresponding to the to-be-modified target text segment in a predetermined display mode in the review result page comprises:
displaying a violation issue introduction and a violation review basis of the violation issue corresponding to the to-be-modified target text segment in the predetermined display mode in the review result page [Col. 17, Ln. 6-25] (identify instances of content items including text that violates one or more policies; test content item may be found to be in violation of the policies associated with multiple stored semantic vectors and, accordingly, is used to update the semantic score).
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 viewing grammar violations in Hoover and the method of compliance verification in Luo, 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 semantic ranking in Luo could be applied to the document editing in Hoover. Luo and Hoover are similar devices because each analyze electronic text. 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 improved accuracy [Luo: Col. 5, Ln. 7-20].
Claim 5:
Deutsch teaches:
The method of claim 4, wherein after displaying a violation issue introduction and a violation review basis of the violation issue corresponding to the to-be-modified target text segment in the predetermined display mode in the review result page, the method further comprises:
receiving a corrected text segment corresponding to the to-be-modified target text segment, and sending the corrected text segment to a review server side [¶ 0066] (language pattern matching may require a great deal of computing resources and thus may be performed in the cloud, such as on remotely-located servers connected via the Internet); and
in accordance with a determination that a feedback response of the corrected text segment eliminating the violation issue is received from the review server side, replacing the to-be-modified target corrected text segment with the corrected text segment in the review result page, and displaying the corrected text segment in the second display style [¶ 0105] (Clicking on a correction suggestion may change an original word or phrase to a corrected one, document reassembled) [¶ 0109] (utilize the text processing engine to verify the corrected error), and
in accordance with a determination that the corrected text segment has the typo issue corresponding to the to-be-modified target text segment, displaying a typo issue introduction and a typo review basis of the typo issue corresponding to the corrected text segment in the predetermined display mode [¶ 0121-122] (correct document is assembled, the software may also create a `track changes` (redline) version of the document, showing all changes between the original document and the corrected document).
Claims 20-23:
Claim(s) 20 and 23 is/are substantially similar to claim 1 and is/are rejected using the same art and the same rationale.
Claim 1 is a “method” claim, claim 20 is a “system” claim and claim 23 is a “medium” claim, but the steps or elements of each claim are essentially the same.
Claim(s) 21 is/are substantially similar to claim 2 and is/are rejected using the same art and the same rationale.
Claim(s) 22 is/are substantially similar to claim 3 and is/are rejected using the same art and the same rationale.
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.
Evidence of the level skill of an ordinary person in the art for Claim 4:
Kwon; Hyukchul et al. US Pub. No. 202/20164530 (Kwon) [¶ 0020, 28, 48, 57, 79] (calculating probabilities of an error word candidate and its surrounding context and determining an error word of the highest priority as a final error word)
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).
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to BENJAMIN J SMITH whose telephone number is (571)270-3825. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Friday 11:00 - 7:30 EST.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, ADAM QUELER can be reached at (571) 272-4140. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/Benjamin Smith/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2172 Direct Phone: 571-270-3825
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Email: benjamin.smith@uspto.gov