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 .
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 1-7 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to abstract idea without significantly more. Claim 6 reciting a document classification method carried out by at least one processor comprising the steps of “selecting at least one generation strategy ..for generating a hypothetical sentence related to a candidate classification as which a document is to be classified”; “generating, in accordance with the selected at least one generation strategy, the hypothetical sentence, which is a sentence related to the candidate classification”; “determining, on the basis of entailment between the document and the hypothetical sentence, a classification as which the document is to be classified”, is directed, under the broadest reasonable interpretation, to claims describing a series of mental processes that can be practically considered to be performed in a human mind or actions to be performed by a person using a pencil and paper or a general purpose computer equipped with a user interface.
In that regard each of the recited steps including “selecting a strategy for generating a hypothetical sentence”
a step that can be performed in the mind or by a person to select a strategy to generate a sentence for the received topic/classification
“Generating a hypothetical sentence according to the strategy”
Forming or writing a hypothetical sentence can be done by a person using paper and pencil
and “determining the classification based on entailment between the hypothetical sentence and the document”,
is directed to action that can equally be performed by a human.
. This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because other than stating that “the steps are carried out by a processor”, the claim does not include any limitation meaningfully tying the abstract idea to a hardware/software, that is specific to the subject matters of the claim.
The claim does not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because the claim does not include any limitation or element other than the one found to be abstract idea.
Claims 1 and 7, directed to the corresponding apparatus and program, are analogous to claim 6, therefore rejected for same reason set forth for claim 6.
Claims 2-5, do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because they are directed to steps further describing the various conditions considered for the abstract idea of selecting a strategy for generating the hypothetical sentence.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-7 are allowable over the prior arts and would be allowable if rewritten to overcome the rejection(s) under 35 U.S.C. 101 set forth above.
The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter: the claims are allowable, because the prior arts of record do not teach the document classification method comprising the steps of selecting a strategy for generating a hypothetical sentence related to a candidate classification as which a document is to be classified; generating, the hypothetical sentence, which is a sentence related to the candidate classification; and determining, on the basis of entailment between the document and the hypothetical sentence, a classification for the document.
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/DANIEL ABEBE/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2657