DETAILED ACTION
This action is responsive to the application filed on 7/16/2024.
Claims 1-20 are pending in this application. Claims 1, 8, and 15 are independent claims.
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 .
Priority
This application is a CON of 17/749,837 which was filed on 05/20/2022, now patent No. 12,050,855. The parent application has a provisional 63/289,471 filed on 12/14/2021.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 7/17/2024 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Claim Objections
Claims 2, 3, 8-10, 16, and 17 are objected to because of the following:
Claim 8, line 1, replace “the system” with “the method”
Claims 2, 3, 9, 10, 16, and 17, replace “an operation” in each of these claims with “the operation” for proper antecedent basis.
Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Interpretation
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(f):
(f) Element in Claim for a Combination. – An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.
The following is a quotation of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph:
An element in a claim for a combination may be expressed as a means or step for performing a specified function without the recital of structure, material, or acts in support thereof, and such claim shall be construed to cover the corresponding structure, material, or acts described in the specification and equivalents thereof.
The claims in this application are given their broadest reasonable interpretation using the plain meaning of the claim language in light of the specification as it would be understood by one of ordinary skill in the art. The broadest reasonable interpretation of a claim element (also commonly referred to as a claim limitation) is limited by the description in the specification when 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, is invoked.
As explained in MPEP § 2181, subsection I, claim limitations that meet the following three-prong test will be interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph:
(A) the claim limitation uses the term “means” or “step” or a term used as a substitute for “means” that is a generic placeholder (also called a nonce term or a non-structural term having no specific structural meaning) for performing the claimed function;
(B) the term “means” or “step” or the generic placeholder is modified by functional language, typically, but not always linked by the transition word “for” (e.g., “means for”) or another linking word or phrase, such as “configured to” or “so that”; and
(C) the term “means” or “step” or the generic placeholder is not modified by sufficient structure, material, or acts for performing the claimed function.
Use of the word “means” (or “step”) in a claim with functional language creates a rebuttable presumption that the claim limitation is to be treated in accordance with 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph. The presumption that the claim limitation is interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, is rebutted when the claim limitation recites sufficient structure, material, or acts to entirely perform the recited function.
Absence of the word “means” (or “step”) in a claim creates a rebuttable presumption that the claim limitation is not to be treated in accordance with 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph. The presumption that the claim limitation is not interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, is rebutted when the claim limitation recites function without reciting sufficient structure, material or acts to entirely perform the recited function.
Claim limitations in this application that use the word “means” (or “step”) are being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, except as otherwise indicated in an Office action. Conversely, claim limitations in this application that do not use the word “means” (or “step”) are not being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, except as otherwise indicated in an Office action.
This application includes one or more claim limitations that do not use the word “means,” but are nonetheless being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, because the claim limitation(s) uses a generic placeholder that is coupled with functional language without reciting sufficient structure to perform the recited function and the generic placeholder is not preceded by a structural modifier. Such claim limitation(s) is/are: “a communication interface that receives …”, “encoding, via a text encoder, each overlapping segment …”, and “generating, via a text decoder, an output summary …” in claim 1.
Because this/these claim limitation(s) is/are being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, it/they is/are being interpreted to cover the corresponding structure described in the specification as performing the claimed function, and equivalents thereof.
According to Applicant’s specifications,
the communication interface is any data interface [see [0032]] that is part of a module, which in turn, may comprise hardware or software-based frameworks [see e.g. [0014]], and
the text encoder and text decoder may be implemented in hardware, software, and/or a combination thereof [see [0032]]. Exemplary encoders/decoders and characteristics thereof are described also in [0017]-[0028], and [0038]-[0066].
If applicant does not intend to have this/these limitation(s) interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph, applicant may: (1) amend the claim limitation(s) to avoid it/them being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph (e.g., by reciting sufficient structure to perform the claimed function); or (2) present a sufficient showing that the claim limitation(s) recite(s) sufficient structure to perform the claimed function so as to avoid it/them being interpreted under 35 U.S.C. 112(f) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, sixth paragraph.
Examiner Comments
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 (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) 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.
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, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 15, 18, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over “Xu, Yumo, and Mirella Lapata. "Coarse-to-fine query focused multi-document summarization." Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (EMNLP). 2020.” (hereinafter as Xu) in view of Feigenblat et al., US Patent No. 10,831,806 B2 (hereinafter as Feigenblat).
Regarding independent claim 1, Xu teaches a system for user-query guided summarization of documents [see title and figure 1], the system comprising hardware [see the hardware noted in the top right portion of p. 3632] executing instructions to perform:
splitting the document into a plurality of overlapping segments [note the document splitting in the 2nd paragraph under “Problem Formulation” section on p. 3634; note the use of overlapping passages as described in the paragraph under equation 9 on p. 3635];
encoding, via a text encoder, each overlapping segment separately appended with the user query into a respective encoding [note the query and sentence/passage concatenation followed by inputting the concatenated sequence to an encoder, as described in the left column under the “3.2 Evidence Estimator” Section on p. 3635];
concatenating encodings of the plurality of overlapping segments into an embedding sequence [note the sequence of outputs obtained from the encoder, as described in the last 3 lines of the left column and the first line of the right column under the “3.2 Evidence Estimator” Section on p. 3635]; and
generating, via a text decoder, an output summary from the embedding sequence [note the summary generation paragraph on the bottom left of p. 3636].
Xu does not explicitly teach a communication interface that receives a document and a user query posing a question relating to a content of the document; a memory storing a plurality of processor-executable instructions; nor a processor executing the instructions to perform operations.
Feigenblat teaches a communication interface [see e.g. the network adapter card or network interface in col. 15, lines 31-32] that receives a document and a user query posing a question relating to a content of the document [see e.g. col.1, lines 38-39]; a memory storing a plurality of processor-executable instructions [see e.g. 204 in fig. 2]; and a processor executing the instructions to perform operations [see e.g. 202 in fig. 2].
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art having the teachings of Xu and Feigenblat before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to specify for the system taught by Xu teach a communication interface that receives a document and a user query posing a question relating to a content of the document; a memory storing a plurality of processor-executable instructions; and a processor executing the instructions to perform operations, as per the teachings of Feigenblat. The motivation for this obvious combination of teachings would be to enable various embodiments and aspects thereof for the framework taught by XU for query-based document summarization, as suggested by Feigenblat [again see e.g. col. 1, lines 30-37].
Independent claims 8 and 15 are rejected analogous to the rejection of claim 1. Refer to the rejection of independent claim 1 above and note the teachings of Feigenblat regarding a non-transitory processor-readable storage medium [see e.g. col. 2, lines 1-19].
Regarding claims 4, 11, and 18, the rejection of claims 1, 8, and 15 are respectively incorporated. Xu further teaches that the encoder and the decoder are built on a Transformer model [note in the caption under figure 1 the use of pretrained BERT which is a pre-trained language representation model that stands for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers”].
Regarding claims 6, 13, and 20, the rejection of claims 1, 8, and 15 are respectively incorporated. Xu further teaches that the text encoder is a single-encoder model that jointly encodes the overlapping segment appended with the user query [again, note inputting the concatenated sequence (including the query and the sentence/passage) to an encoder, as described in the left column under the “3.2 Evidence Estimator” Section on p. 3635; note, again, the use of overlapping passages as described in the paragraph under equation 9 on p. 3635].
Claims 2, 3, 9, 10, 16, and 17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Xu in view of Feigenblat, and further in view of “Izacard, Gautier, and Edouard Grave. "Leveraging passage retrieval with generative models for open domain question answering." Proceedings of the 16th conference of the European chapter of the association for computational linguistics: main volume. 2021” (hereinafter as Izacard).
Regarding claims 2, 9, and 16, the rejection of claims 1, 8, and 15 are respectively incorporated. The previously combined art does not explicitly teach that the operation of encoding comprises: applying sparse attention within each overlapping segment without cross-attention between encoded segments.
Izacard teaches an operation of encoding that comprises: applying sparse attention within each segment without cross-attention between encoded segments [note in the last paragraph before the “Experiments” section on p. 876 that the passages are independently processed in the encoder].
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art having the teachings of Xu and Izacard before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to apply Izacard’s independent encoding for segments in the encoder to Xu’s overlapping segments to explicitly specify that the operation of encoding comprises: applying sparse attention within each overlapping segment without cross-attention between encoded segments. The motivation for this obvious combination of teachings would be to allow scaling to large number of contexts since self-attention is performed only over one context at a time which means that the model computation time would grow linearly with time rather than quadratically, as suggested by Izacard [again see the last paragraph before the “Experiments” section on p. 876].
Regarding claims 3, 10, and 17, the rejection of claims 1, 8, and 15 are respectively incorporated. The previously combined art does not explicitly teach that the operation of generating the output summary comprises: attending, by the decoder, to all encoded segments jointly.
Izacard teaches an operation of generating the output that comprises: attending, by the decoder, to all encoded segments jointly [note in the last paragraph before the “Experiments” section on p. 876 that the (encoded) passages are jointly processed in the decoder].
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art having the teachings of Xu and Izacard before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to apply Izacard’s joint decoding for segments to Xu’s encoded output (the embedding sequence of concatenated encodings) to explicitly specify that the operation of generating the output summary comprises: attending, by the decoder, to all encoded segments jointly. The motivation for this obvious combination of teachings would be to allow for better aggregation of evidence from multiple passages, as suggested by Izacard [again see the last paragraph before the “Experiments” section on p. 876].
Claims 5, 12, and 19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Xu in view of Feigenblat, and further in view of Stoyanovsky et al., US PGPUB 2020/0184012 A1 (hereinafter as Stoyanovsky) and “Bambroo, Purbid, and Aditi Awasthi. "Legaldb: long distilBert for legal document classification." 2021 International Conference on advances in electrical, computing, communication and sustainable technologies (ICAECT). IEEE, 2021” (hereinafter as Bambroo).
Regarding claims 5, 12, and 19, the rejection of claims 1, 8, and 15 are respectively incorporated. The previously combined art does not explicitly teach that the source document contains query-relevant sections that are related to the input query, and wherein the query-relevant sections have a size within a processing capacity of a Transformer model.
Stoyanovsky teaches a source document that contains query-relevant sections that are related to an input query [note e.g. in [0058] the description of identified query-relevant sections of the document].
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art having the teachings of Xu and Stoyanovsky before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the framework taught by Xu by explicitly specifying that the source document contains query-relevant sections that are related to the input query, as per the teachings of Stoyanovsky. The motivation for this obvious combination of teachings would be to allow focusing on particular content that is related to the posed query which would enhance the efficiency and competence of the query-based document summarization process, as can be suggested by the description of Stoyanovsky [again see [0058]].
The previously combined art, still, does not explicitly teach that the query-relevant sections have a size within a processing capacity of a Transformer model.
Bambroo teaches content sections having a size within a processing capacity of a Transformer model [note e.g. in the abstract and in the first paragraph of the “Introduction” section the description of the limitation of the content length a Transformer model can accept for processing].
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art having the teachings of the previously combined art and Bambroo before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the framework taught by the teachings of the combined art by explicitly specifying that the query-relevant sections have a size within a processing capacity of a Transformer model, as per the teachings of Bambroo. The motivation for this obvious combination of teachings would be to understand the limitations of the underlying technologies/utilized encoder/decoder models/systems so as to enable better adaptation to these limitations in view of the received documents, as can be suggested by the description of Bambroo [again see the abstract and in the first paragraph of the “Introduction” section].
Claims 7 and 14 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Xu in view of Feigenblat, and further in view of “Qu, Yingqi, et al. "RocketQA: An optimized training approach to dense passage retrieval for open-domain question answering." Proceedings of the 2021 conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics: human language technologies. 2021.” (hereinafter as Qu).
Regarding claims 7 and 14, the rejection of claims 1 and 8 are respectively incorporated. The previously combined art does not explicitly teach that the text encoder is a double-encoder model that separately encodes the user query and the overlapping segment into a query embedding and a passage embedding, respectively.
Qu teaches a text encoder that is a double-encoder model that separately encodes the user query and the segment into a query embedding and a passage embedding, respectively [note fig. 1(a) and note in the second half of the right column of the first page the separation of the encodings of questions and passages in an end-to-end manner].
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art having the teachings of Xu and Qu before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to apply Qu’s dual-encoder architecture to Xu’s overlapping segments to explicitly specify that the text encoder is a double-encoder model that separately encodes the user query and the overlapping segment into a query embedding and a passage embedding, respectively. The motivation for this obvious combination of teachings would be to allow dealing with term mismatch in ways that provide better representation for semantic mismatching, as suggested by Qu [again see the second half of the right column of the first page].
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Examiner notes from the cited art:
“Ren, Ruiyang, et al. "PAIR: Leveraging passage-centric similarity relation for improving dense passage retrieval." Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021. 2021” which teaches the use of a dual-encoder architecture to learn representations of queries and passages for further examining similarity relationships for improved dense passage retrieval.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to MARIA S AYAD whose telephone number is (571)272-2743. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday, 7:30 am - 4:30 pm. Alt, Friday, EST.
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice.
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.
Information regarding the status of published or unpublished applications may be obtained from Patent Center. Unpublished application information in Patent Center is available to registered users. To file and manage patent submissions in Patent Center, visit: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov. Visit https://www.uspto.gov/patents/apply/patent-center for more information about Patent Center and https://www.uspto.gov/patents/docx for information about filing in DOCX format. For additional questions, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free). If you would like assistance from a USPTO Customer Service Representative, call 800-786-9199 (IN USA OR CANADA) or 571-272-1000.
/MARIA S AYAD/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2172
Prosecution Insights