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 .
Specification
The disclosure is objected to because of the following informalities:
In paragraph 0103, lines 6-7, “semantically similars” should read “semantically similar”.
In paragraph 0106, line 3, “semantically similars” should read “semantically similar”.
In paragraph 0112, line 3, “semantically similars” should read “semantically similar”.
Appropriate correction is required.
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 and 9 – 11 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more.
Claim 1 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more. The claim recites a non-transitory storage medium storing a program for causing a computer: first conversion processing to convert a first document into a document segmented into morphemes on a basis of a dictionary to be used in morphological analysis and to delete overlapping morphemes to generate a first summary; second conversion processing to convert a second document determined to be relevant to the first document into a document segmented into morphemes on a basis of the dictionary to be used in the morphological analysis and to delete overlapping morphemes to generate a second summary; counting processing to count a number of matching morphemes between the first summary obtained by deleting the overlapping morphemes from the morphemes of the first document and the second summary obtained by deleting the overlapping morphemes from the morphemes of the second document; and extraction processing to determine relevance between the first document and the second document on a basis of a result of the counting processing and to extract part or all of the second document for which the relevance to the first document satisfies a predetermined condition.
The claim 1 limitations, under their broadest reasonable interpretation, cover performance of the limitations in the mind but for the recitation of generic computer components. That is, other than reciting “a non-transitory storage medium” and “a computer”, nothing in the claim elements preclude the actions from practically being performed in the mind. For example, “convert” in the context of this claim encompasses a person using a dictionary to segment documents into morphemes and removing overlapping morphemes, “count” in the context of this claim encompasses a person counting the matching morphemes between two documents, “determine relevance” in the context of this claim encompasses a person determining if two documents are similar based on the count of matching morphemes, and “extract” in the context of this claim encompasses a person selecting a second document that is similar to a first document. If a claim limitation, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind but for the recitation of generic computer components, then it falls within the “Mental Processes” grouping of abstract ideas. Accordingly, the claim recites an abstract idea.
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. In particular, the claim only recites the additional elements “a non-transitory storage medium” and “a computer”. The additional elements amount to no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components. Examples of generic computer components can be found in paragraph 0011 of the specification, “The CPU 101 is one type of a control circuit. Various kinds of processors such as a micro processing unit (MPU) and a graphics processing unit (GPU) may be used in place of the CPU 101.”. Accordingly, the additional elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they do not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea. The claim is directed to an abstract idea.
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 integration of the abstract idea into a practical application, the additional elements amount to no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components. Mere instructions to apply an exception using generic computer components cannot provide an inventive concept. The claim is not patent eligible.
Claims 2 – 7 and 9 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more. Claims 2 – 7 and 9 depend from claim 1, and thus recite the limitations of claim 1.
For the reasons discussed above for claim 1, the claim 1 limitations recite abstract ideas. The additional limitations of claims 2 – 7 and 9 do not preclude the steps of claim 1 from practically being performed in the mind. For example, a person using the method of claim 1 to identify similar documents could also perform the limitations of claims 2 – 7 and 9:
Claim 2: A person could include all parts of speech when segmenting documents into morphemes.
Claim 3: A person could replace morphemes base forms when segmenting documents into morphemes.
Claim 4: A person could divide a document into portions of a predetermined number of characters and count the matching morphemes between a first document and the portions of a second document.
Claim 5: A person could count the matching morphemes between a document and separate text files.
Claim 6: A person could remove line breaks from documents.
Claim 7: A person could select a document portion from a second document with the most matching morphemes compared to a first document.
Claim 9: A person could determine the language of a first document, translate the first document to Japanese, find the similarity of a second document written in Japanese, and translate the second document to the original language of the first document.
The claims do not integrate the judicial exception into a practical application. For the reasons discussed above for claim 1, the additional elements amount to no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components. Accordingly, these elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they do not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea.
The claims do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. For the reasons discussed above for claim 1, mere instructions to apply an exception using generic computer components cannot provide an inventive concept. The claims are not patent eligible.
Claim 10 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more. The claim recites a document extraction method to be performed by a computer, the document extraction method comprising: converting a first document into a document segmented into morphemes on a basis of a dictionary to be used in morphological analysis and deleting overlapping morphemes to generate a first summary; converting a second document determined to be relevant to the first document into a document segmented into morphemes on a basis of the dictionary to be used in the morphological analysis and deleting overlapping morphemes to generate a second summary; counting a number of matching morphemes between the first summary obtained by deleting the overlapping morphemes from the morphemes of the first document and the second summary obtained by deleting the overlapping morphemes from the morphemes of the second document; and determining relevance between the first document and the second document on a basis of a result of processing of the counting and extracting part or all of the second document relevant to the first document.
The claim 10 limitations, under their broadest reasonable interpretation, cover performance of the limitations in the mind but for the recitation of generic computer components. That is, other than reciting “a computer”, nothing in the claim elements preclude the actions from practically being performed in the mind. For example, “converting” in the context of this claim encompasses a person using a dictionary to segment documents into morphemes and removing overlapping morphemes, “counting” in the context of this claim encompasses a person counting the matching morphemes between two documents, “determining relevance” in the context of this claim encompasses a person determining if two documents are similar based on the count of matching morphemes, and “extracting” in the context of this claim encompasses a person selecting a second document that is similar to a first document. If a claim limitation, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind but for the recitation of generic computer components, then it falls within the “Mental Processes” grouping of abstract ideas. Accordingly, the claim recites an abstract idea.
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. In particular, the claim only recites the additional element “a computer”. The additional element amounts to no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components. Examples of generic computer components can be found in paragraph 0011 of the specification, “The CPU 101 is one type of a control circuit. Various kinds of processors such as a micro processing unit (MPU) and a graphics processing unit (GPU) may be used in place of the CPU 101.”. Accordingly, the additional element does not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because it does not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea. The claim is directed to an abstract idea.
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 integration of the abstract idea into a practical application, the additional element amounts to no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components. Mere instructions to apply an exception using generic computer components cannot provide an inventive concept. The claim is not patent eligible.
Claim 11 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more. The claim recites a language processing apparatus comprising a processor configured to execute: converting a first document into a document segmented into morphemes on a basis of a dictionary to be used in morphological analysis and deleting overlapping morphemes to generate a first summary; converting a second document determined to be relevant to the first document into a document segmented into morphemes on a basis of the dictionary to be used in the morphological analysis and deleting overlapping morphemes to generate a second summary; counting a number of matching morphemes between the first summary obtained by deleting the overlapping morphemes from the morphemes of the first document and the second summary obtained by deleting the overlapping morphemes from the morphemes of the second document; and determining relevance between the first document and the second document on a basis of a result of processing of the counting and extracting part or all of the second document relevant to the first document.
The claim 11 limitations, under their broadest reasonable interpretation, cover performance of the limitations in the mind but for the recitation of generic computer components. That is, other than reciting “a language processing apparatus” and “a processor”, nothing in the claim elements preclude the actions from practically being performed in the mind. For example, “converting” in the context of this claim encompasses a person using a dictionary to segment documents into morphemes and removing overlapping morphemes, “counting” in the context of this claim encompasses a person counting the matching morphemes between two documents, “determining relevance” in the context of this claim encompasses a person determining if two documents are similar based on the count of matching morphemes, and “extracting” in the context of this claim encompasses a person selecting a second document that is similar to a first document. If a claim limitation, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind but for the recitation of generic computer components, then it falls within the “Mental Processes” grouping of abstract ideas. Accordingly, the claim recites an abstract idea.
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. In particular, the claim only recites the additional elements “a language processing apparatus” and “a processor”. The additional elements amount to no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components. Examples of generic computer components can be found in paragraph 0011 of the specification, “The CPU 101 is one type of a control circuit. Various kinds of processors such as a micro processing unit (MPU) and a graphics processing unit (GPU) may be used in place of the CPU 101.”. Accordingly, the additional elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they do not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea. The claim is directed to an abstract idea.
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 integration of the abstract idea into a practical application, the additional elements amount to no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using generic computer components. Mere instructions to apply an exception using generic computer components cannot provide an inventive concept. The claim is not patent eligible.
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.
Claims 1 – 2 and 10 – 11 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Masamochi et al. (Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004/171220), hereinafter Masamochi, in view of Morimoto (US Patent No. 12,164,549).
Regarding claim 1, Masamochi discloses a non-transitory storage medium storing a program (Paragraph 0014, lines 4-5, "The document management device 1 according to the present embodiment includes an arithmetic device such as a CPU, a storage device such as a memory"; Paragraph 0014, line 9, "The hardware device is controlled by a program") for causing a computer:
first conversion processing to convert a first document into a document segmented into morphemes [on a basis of a dictionary] to be used in morphological analysis and to delete overlapping morphemes to generate a first summary (Paragraph 0016, lines 1-8, "The morphological analysis unit 12 morphologically analyzes the character string included in the document data, more specifically, the document data, and decomposes the character string included in the document data into morphemes including words and parts of speech of the words. Here, FIG. 2 is a diagram showing a state of the morphological analysis. For example, when a character string “I like flowers” is morphologically analyzed, as shown in FIG. 2, the words “I”, “ha”, “flower”, “ga”, “like” and these words Can be decomposed into morphemes composed of the morphological analysis unit 12 arranges the plurality of morphemes thus obtained in a predetermined order. The array of morphemes obtained for each document data is referred to as a feature vector for convenience."; Paragraph 0017, lines 10-17, "In the present embodiment, when generating the feature vector, the morphemes are arranged in the order of appearance. When the morphemes are arranged in the order of appearance frequency, the morphemes are arranged in the order of the morpheme having the highest appearance frequency in the character string. In the case of FIG. 3, since three words “Yamatake”, “no”, and “Fujisawa” appear three times each, the words are arranged from the morphemes including these three words. Note that morphemes having the same number of appearances are arranged in the order of appearance. When morphemes are arranged in the order of appearance frequency in this manner, since morphemes having the highest appearance frequency are arranged, a feature vector in which the theme and content of a sentence are emphasized is generated."; Decomposing the character string included in the document data into morphemes reads on converting a first document into a document segmented into morphemes, and obtaining an array of morphemes for each document, where a morpheme with multiple appearances appears only one time in the array of morphemes, reads on deleting overlapping morphemes to generate a first summary.);
second conversion processing to convert a second document determined to be relevant to the first document into a document segmented into morphemes [on a basis of the dictionary] to be used in the morphological analysis and to delete overlapping morphemes to generate a second summary (Paragraph 0016, lines 1-8, "The morphological analysis unit 12 morphologically analyzes the character string included in the document data, more specifically, the document data, and decomposes the character string included in the document data into morphemes including words and parts of speech of the words. Here, FIG. 2 is a diagram showing a state of the morphological analysis. For example, when a character string “I like flowers” is morphologically analyzed, as shown in FIG. 2, the words “I”, “ha”, “flower”, “ga”, “like” and these words Can be decomposed into morphemes composed of The morphological analysis unit 12 arranges the plurality of morphemes thus obtained in a predetermined order. The array of morphemes obtained for each document data is referred to as a feature vector for convenience."; Paragraph 0017, lines 10-17, "In the present embodiment, when generating the feature vector, the morphemes are arranged in the order of appearance. When the morphemes are arranged in the order of appearance frequency, the morphemes are arranged in the order of the morpheme having the highest appearance frequency in the character string. In the case of FIG. 3, since three words “Yamatake”, “no”, and “Fujisawa” appear three times each, the words are arranged from the morphemes including these three words. Note that morphemes having the same number of appearances are arranged in the order of appearance. When morphemes are arranged in the order of appearance frequency in this manner, since morphemes having the highest appearance frequency are arranged, a feature vector in which the theme and content of a sentence are emphasized is generated."; Paragraph 0019, lines 1-3, "The duplication degree calculation unit 13 calculates the characteristic vector of one document data (second document data) generated by the morphological analysis unit 12 and the other of the document data (first document data) stored in the document DB 18."; Decomposing the character string included in the document data into morphemes reads on converting a first document into a document segmented into morphemes, obtaining an array of morphemes for each document, where a morpheme with multiple appearances appears only one time in the array of morphemes, reads on deleting overlapping morphemes to generate a first summary, and comparing the morphological analysis for two documents reads on the morphological analysis being performed on a second document.);
counting processing to count a number of matching morphemes between the first summary obtained by deleting the overlapping morphemes from the morphemes of the first document and the second summary obtained by deleting the overlapping morphemes from the morphemes of the second document (Paragraph 0020, lines 1-2, "First, feature vectors are compared between two documents, and the number of common morphemes is counted."; Counting the number of common morphemes between two documents reads on counting a number of matching morphemes between the first summary obtained by deleting the overlapping morphemes from the morphemes of the first document and the second summary obtained by deleting the overlapping morphemes from the morphemes of the second document.);
and extraction processing to determine relevance between the first document and the second document on a basis of a result of the counting processing and to extract part or all of the second document for which the relevance to the first document satisfies a predetermined condition (Paragraph 0025, lines 1-2, "Next, the counted number of common morphemes between two documents is divided by the total number of morphemes obtained from one document, and this quotient is the degree of overlap."; Paragraph 0027, lines 1-7, "The similarity calculator 14 calculates the similarity between the two documents based on the redundancy calculated by the redundancy calculator 13 and records the similarity in the document DB 18. The similarity means an index indicating whether or not the contents of two documents have commonality. Such similarity can be expressed as a binary relation. When calculating the similarity, the similarity calculation unit 14 gives the similarity 1 as the similarity between the two sentences when the redundancy calculated by the redundancy calculation unit 13 is equal to or more than a predetermined threshold, and does not reach the threshold. In this case, similarity 0 is given as dissimilar."; Paragraph 0029, lines 1-3, "The extracting unit 16 extracts other document data similar to one document data from the document DB 18 based on the similarity calculated by the similarity calculating unit 14 and sends the document data to the outside via the I/F 11."; Calculating the similarity between the two documents based on the redundancy calculated by the redundancy calculator reads on determine relevance between the first document and the second document on a basis of a result of the counting processing, and extracting other document data similar to one document data from the document database based on the similarity calculated reads on extracting part or all of the second document for which the relevance to the first document satisfies a predetermined condition.).
Masamochi does not specifically disclose: processing to convert a first document into a document segmented into morphemes on a basis of a dictionary.
Morimoto teaches:
processing to convert a first document into a document segmented into morphemes on a basis of a dictionary (Column 4, lines 46-53, "The analysis unit 11 performs a morphological analysis on the search keyword input from the input unit 1 based on a search dictionary defined in advance, and divides the search keyword into words of the smallest unit. A vector (a word vector or a feature vector) characterizing the search keyword is calculated. The feature extraction unit 13 receives the result of the morphological analysis and extracts the features of the search keyword.").
Morimoto is considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because it is in the same field of document similarity analysis. Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Masamochi to incorporate the teachings of Morimoto to perform a morphological analysis on the search keyword input based on a search dictionary defined in advance. Doing so would allow for determining the similarity between documents (Morimoto; Column 2, lines 14-26).
Regarding claim 2, Masamochi in view of Morimoto discloses the non-transitory storage medium storing the program as claimed in claim 1.
Masamochi further discloses:
wherein documents converted and segmented through the first conversion processing and the second conversion processing include all parts of speech obtained in a case where the morphological analysis is executed (Paragraph 0016, lines 1-3, "The morphological analysis unit 12 morphologically analyzes the character string included in the document data, more specifically, the document data, and decomposes the character string included in the document data into morphemes including words and parts of speech of the words.").
Regarding claim 10, arguments analogous to claim 1 are applicable.
Regarding claim 11, arguments analogous to claim 1 are applicable. In addition, Masamochi discloses a language processing apparatus comprising a processor (Paragraph 0014, lines 4-5, "The document management device 1 according to the present embodiment includes an arithmetic device such as a CPU, a storage device such as a memory") configured to execute the steps of claim 1.
Claim 3 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Masamochi in view of Morimoto as applied to claim 1 above, and further in view of Zhang et al. (US Patent No. 11,734,364), hereinafter Zhang.
Regarding claim 3, Masamochi in view of Morimoto discloses the non-transitory storage medium storing the program as claimed in claim 1, but does not specifically disclose: wherein the first conversion processing and the second conversion processing further cause replacement processing to replace the morphemes in each of the first document and the second document with base forms of parts of speech to which the morphemes belong.
Zhang teaches:
wherein the first conversion processing and the second conversion processing further cause replacement processing to replace the morphemes in each of the first document and the second document with base forms of parts of speech to which the morphemes belong (Column 9, lines 15-20, "In Step 504, the document content is stemmed, i.e., the tokenized words of the document content are replaced by the corresponding word stems. For example, the words “fishing”, fished” and “fisher” may be reduced to the root word fish. Alternatively, lemmatization may be used to obtain the word stems."; Replacing the tokenized words of the document with the corresponding word stems reads on replacing the morphemes in each of the first document and the second document with base forms of parts of speech to which the morphemes belong.).
Zhang is considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because it is in the same field of document similarity analysis. Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Masamochi in view of Morimoto to incorporate the teachings of Zhang to replace tokenized words of a document with the corresponding word stems. Doing so would allow for assessing document content similarity where a large volume of archived documents need to be reviewed for similarity to a reference document (Zhang; Column 2, lines 11-27).
Claim 5 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Masamochi in view of Morimoto as applied to claim 1 above, and further in view of Henzinger (US Patent No. 8,015,162).
Regarding claim 5, Masamochi in view of Morimoto discloses the non-transitory storage medium storing the program as claimed in claim 1, but does not specifically disclose: wherein the second document is divided into document portions in units of file, and in the counting processing, a number of matching morphemes is counted between the morphemes of the first document and morphemes of the divided document portions.
Henzinger teaches:
wherein the second document is divided into document portions in units of file, and in the counting processing, a number of matching morphemes is counted between the morphemes of the first document and morphemes of the divided document portions (Column 1, lines 13-19, "In the following, the term "document(s)" should be broadly interpreted and may include content such as Web pages, text files, multimedia files, object features, link structure, etc. Also, it should be noted that when near-duplicate documents are detected, exact duplicate documents will also be detected as a consequence (though such exact duplicates might not necessarily be distinguished from near-duplicates)."; Column 6, lines 36-47, "In at least some embodiments consistent with the present invention, the first document similarity technique might be token frequency independent, and the second document similarity technique might be frequency dependent. In at least some embodiments consistent with the present invention, the first document similarity technique might determine whether two documents are near-duplicates using representations based on a subset of the words or tokens of the documents, and the second document similarity technique might determine whether two documents are near-duplicates using representations based on all of the words or tokens of the documents."; Determining whether documents are near-duplicates using representations based on all of the words or tokens of the documents, where the documents are text files, reads on the second document being divided into document portions in units of file and counting the number of matching morphemes between the first document and the divided document portions.).
Henzinger is considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because it is in the same field of document similarity analysis. Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Masamochi in view of Morimoto to incorporate the teachings of Henzinger to determine whether documents are near-duplicates using representations based on all of the words or tokens of the documents, where the documents are text files. Doing so would allow for detecting near-duplicate documents for indicating plagiarism or copyright infringement (Henzinger; Column 1, lines 20-24).
Claim 8 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Masamochi in view of Morimoto as applied to claim 1 above, and further in view of Uchida (US Patent No. 11,537,795).
Regarding claim 8, Masamochi in view of Morimoto discloses the non-transitory storage medium storing the program as claimed in claim 1, but does not specifically disclose: wherein the non-transitory storage medium storing the program causing the computer the first conversion processing, the second conversion processing, the counting processing and the extraction processing through operation using an input device with respect to a search button for which depression is to be detected.
Uchida teaches:
wherein the non-transitory storage medium storing the program causing the computer the first conversion processing, the second conversion processing, the counting processing and the extraction processing through operation using an input device with respect to a search button for which depression is to be detected (Column 5, lines 2-4, "The search processing only needs to be able to compare texts and numeralizates the similarity, and can be implemented using a known full-text search technique or the like."; Column 14, lines 22-33, "The display screen of the terminal 19 includes a search field 1401, an input field 1405 for the user to input a question sentence, a search button 1406, a synonym table editing button 1407, and an attribute word table editing button 1408. The search field 1401 includes a display of a normalization result 1402 of a question sentence input to the input field 1405 and a display of an answer sentence 1403 obtained as a result of a search. The displays 1402 and 1403 of the search field 1401 are displayed when the search button 1406 is pressed for the question sentence of the input field 1405. 1404 denotes a scroll bar for displaying dialog histories (search histories)."; Displaying the search field when the search button is pressed reads on causing processing using an input device with respect to a search button for which depression is to be detected.).
Uchida is considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because it is in the same field of document similarity analysis. Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Masamochi in view of Morimoto to incorporate the teachings of Uchida to display a search field when a search button is pressed. Doing so would allow for an interactive document search for obtaining an answer sentence to a question sentence (Uchida; Column 1, lines 9-14).
Claim 9 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Masamochi in view of Morimoto as applied to claim 1 above, and further in view of Atroshchenko et al. (US Patent No. 9,811,726), hereinafter Atroshchenko, and Jiang et al. (US Patent No. 8,346,536), hereinafter Jiang
Regarding claim 9, Masamochi in view of Morimoto discloses the non-transitory storage medium storing the program as claimed in claim 1, but does not specifically disclose: determination processing to determine whether or not the first document is a document expressed in Japanese.
Atroshchenko teaches:
determination processing to determine whether or not the first document is a document expressed in Japanese (Column 1, lines 33-35, "Disclosed are systems, computer-readable mediums, and methods for determining a text contains Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters.").
Atroshchenko is considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because it is in the same field of language detection Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Masamochi in view of Morimoto to incorporate the teachings of Atroshchenko to determine a text contains Japanese characters. Doing so would allow for excluding languages from the languages being used in character recognition of a document to avoid launching resource-intensive recognition methods (Atroshchenko; Column 2, lines 9-20).
Masamochi in view of Morimoto and Atroshchenko does not specifically disclose: in reaction to a determination that the first document is a document expressed in language other than Japanese, first translation processing of causing a system that supports translation to translate the first document expressed in the language other than Japanese into a document expressed in Japanese; and second translation processing of causing the system that supports translation or other systems that support translation to translate the extracted part or all of the second document into a document expressed in the language.
Jiang teaches:
in reaction to a determination that the first document is a document expressed in language other than Japanese, first translation processing of causing a system that supports translation to translate the first document expressed in the language other than Japanese into a document expressed in Japanese (Column 4, lines 34-43, "In an aspect of this disclosure, a search query in a source language is translated into multiple search queries in a target language (for example, specified by language code and/or tag). In addition, the retrieved target language documents can be translated back into the source language, with multiple translation results. Thus not only the relevant documents that match the search queries can be retrieved and displayed to the user, but also the documents that match the synonyms, translation options and/or related terms of the queries can be retrieved and displayed to the user."; Translating a search query in a source language into a search query in a target language to retrieve relevant documents that match the search query reads on translating the first document expressed in the language other than Japanese into a document expressed in Japanese.);
and second translation processing of causing the system that supports translation or other systems that support translation to translate the extracted part or all of the second document into a document expressed in the language (Column 4, lines 34-43, "In an aspect of this disclosure, a search query in a source language is translated into multiple search queries in a target language (for example, specified by language code and/or tag). In addition, the retrieved target language documents can be translated back into the source language, with multiple translation results. Thus not only the relevant documents that match the search queries can be retrieved and displayed to the user, but also the documents that match the synonyms, translation options and/or related terms of the queries can be retrieved and displayed to the user."; Translating retrieved target language documents back into the source language reads on translating the second document into a document expressed in the language.).
Jiang is considered to be analogous to the claimed invention because it is in the same field of document similarity analysis. Therefore, it would have been obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Masamochi in view of Morimoto and Atroshchenko to incorporate the teachings of Jiang to translate a search query in a source language into a search query in a target language to retrieve relevant documents that match the search query, and translate the retrieved target language documents back into the source language. Doing so would allow for increasing probabilities of retrieving relevant documents through multiple versions of the queried documents and the corresponding translated results (Jiang; Column 4, lines 29-33).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure:
Sunaga et al. (US Patent No. 11,829,719)
Shrinivasan et al. (US Patent No. 11,658,824)
Alspector et al. (US Patent No. 7,984,029)
Qurashi et al. ("Document Processing: Methods for Semantic Text Similarity Analysis")
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to James Boggs whose telephone number is (571)272-2968. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM.
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/JAMES BOGGS/Examiner, Art Unit 2657