DETAILED ACTION
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 .
Status of Claims
Claims 1-9 are pending in this application.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 2-4 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor, or for pre-AIA the applicant regards as the invention.
Claims 2-4 recite the limitation "the remainder" in line 3 of claim 2 and line 2 of clams 3 and 4. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
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 1-9 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more. The independent claim 1 recites “parsing a transcript of a discourse into a series of semantically self-contained passages by detecting a series of anchor questions in the discourse, each anchor question corresponding to a semantic shift in the discourse, and identifying a set of semantically related discourse for each anchor question, and associating each semantically self-contained passage with a respective navigation marker that enables locating of the respective semantically self-contained passages in the transcript”.
The limitation of “parsing…”, “identifying…” and “associating…” is a process that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers a human organizing of activities. More specifically, a human reads a document, organizes questions and corresponding answers by topic or meaning, and associates them with markers.
The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. As discussed above with respect to the integration of the abstract idea into a practical application, the additional element of using a computer amounts to no more than mere instructions to apply an exception using a generic computer component. Mere instructions to apply an exception using a generic computer component cannot provide an inventive concept. The claim is not patent eligible.
With respect to dependent claim 5, the claim does not recite any technical details about how the neural network detects the questions, nor does it describe any novel hardware or software architecture that improves computer functionality. The steps are performed on generic hardware without any specific enhancement to the technology.
With respect to dependent claim 8, the claim does not recite any technical details about how the large language model operates differently from conventional language models, nor does it describe any novel hardware or software architecture that improves computer functionality. The steps are performed on generic hardware without any specific enhancement to the technology.
With respect to dependent claims 2-9, the claims do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
The claims thus fail to recite an inventive concept sufficient to transform the abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention. See Alice, 573 U.S. at 221 (holding that implementing an abstract idea on a generic computer is insufficient).
Therefore, claims 1-9 are rejected.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1-5 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102 (a)(1) as being anticipated by Galitsky (US Pub. 2020/0184155).
Regarding claim 1, Galitsky disclose a method for anchor-based discourse parsing, comprising:
parsing a transcript of a discourse into a series of semantically self-contained passages by detecting a series of anchor questions in the discourse, each anchor question corresponding to a semantic shift in the discourse, and identifying a set of semantically related discourse for each anchor question (Figs. 1 and 15, steps 1501 and 1502, [0051]-[0054][0130] receiving input text which includes strings of interaction between an agent and a customer/questions and answers; Figs. 5-7, [0130][0181] parsing text and generating a discourse tree that represents rhetorical relationships between the sentence fragments),
associating each semantically self-contained passage with a respective navigation marker that enables locating of the respective semantically self-contained passages in the transcript (Fig. 1, [0038][0051]-[0055] associating each passage and a respective question and determining suitable locations for the annotating questions to be inserted into the text; [0190] “a marker can be inserted in the text … question can be inserted at this marker”).
Regarding claim 2, Galitsky disclose the method of claim 1, and Galisky further discloses:
wherein detecting includes detecting a question in the discourse that includes a set of information within the question that enables the question to be understood independently of the remainder of the discourse (Fig. 1, example questions 141-143, [0038][0039][0051][0054] analyzing a discourse and identifying questions which is formed using rhetorical structure theory to identify answers; “The question templates can be used to verify that a generated question is of sufficient specificity”).
Regarding claim 3, Galitsky disclose the method of claim 1, and Galisky further discloses:
wherein identifying comprises identifying a question in the discourse that cannot be understood independently of the remainder of the discourse (Fig. 1, [0039] an example question, 141, cannot be understood independently of the rest of the discourse alone with using rhetorical structure theory to form questions that correspond to the answers).
Regarding claim 4, Galitsky disclose the method of claim 1, and Galisky further discloses:
wherein identifying comprises identifying an answer in the discourse that cannot be understood independently of the remainder of the discourse (Fig. 1, [0039] an example answer for a question 143, cannot be understood independently of the rest of the discourse alone with using rhetorical structure theory to identify answers).
Regarding claim 5, Galitsky disclose the method of claim 1, and Galisky further discloses:
wherein detecting includes training a neural network to detect the anchor questions ([0268] “neural network-based techniques such as sequence-to-sequence learning have achieved remarkable success in various NLP tasks, including question generation”).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
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.
The text of those sections of Title 35, U.S. Code not included in this action can be found in a prior Office action.
The factual inquiries set forth in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 148 USPQ 459 (1966), that are applied for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claims 6 and 7 are rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 103(a) as being unpatentable over Galitsky (US Pub. 2020/0184155) in view of Fox et al., (US Pub. 2021/0174016).
Regarding claim 5, Galitsky disclose the method of claim 1.
Galitsky does not explicitly teach however Fox does explicitly teach:
wherein the navigation markers are derived from a set of page and line numbers of the transcript (Fox, Fig. 3, [0126] a transcription includes a page and line numbers).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate the method of the present disclosure using discourse analysis and other techniques to form questions and answers from text as taught by Galitsky with the method of generating legal statements with markers as taught by Fox to provide convenience to users by providing legal documents with page and line numbers
Regarding claim 7, Galitsky disclose the method of claim 1.
Galitsky does not explicitly teach however Fox does explicitly teach:
wherein the transcript is of a deposition in a legal proceeding (Fox, Fig. 3, [0126][0132] a legal deposition transcript).
The previous motivation statement as in claim 6 is still applied.
Claims 8 and 9 are rejected under pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 103(a) as being unpatentable over Galitsky (US Pub. 2020/0184155) in view of Elangovan et al., (US Pub. 2024/0428002, filed on Jun. 22, 2023).
Regarding claim 8, Galitsky disclose the method of claim 1.
Galitsky does not explicitly teach however Elangovan does explicitly teach:
resolving an ambiguity in at least one of the anchor questions using a large language model (Elangovan, [0028] “a trained large language model of the medical conversation summarization service may be used to process and understand medical conversations”).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to incorporate the method of the present disclosure using discourse analysis and other techniques to form questions and answers from text as taught by Galitsky with the method of generating the summary using a large language model to improve the quality of a generated transcript and generated summary and the functioning of the computer system by facilitating creation of additional summarization styles (Elangovan, [0025][0034][0038]).
Regarding claim 9, Galitsky disclose the method of claim 1.
Galitsky does not explicitly teach however Elangovan does explicitly teach:
merging at least two of the semantically self-contained passages by determining a similarity metric in response to the two (Elangovan, Figs. 8A and 8B, [0078] merging transcript of a medical conversation and generating summary for the transcript having a summarization style).
The previous motivation statement as in claim 8 is still applied.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. Please see attached form PTO-892.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to SEONG-AH A. SHIN whose telephone number is (571)272-5933. The examiner can normally be reached 9 AM-3PM.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Pierre-Louis Desir can be reached at 571-272-7799. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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Seong-ah A. Shin
Primary Examiner
Art Unit 2659
/SEONG-AH A SHIN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2659
Prosecution Insights