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 .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
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.
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.
Claim(s) 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Ming et al. (US 2008/0126076 A1, “Ming”).
As to claims 1, 5, 9, Ming discloses a non-transitory computer-readable recording medium storing a language processing program for causing a computer to execute a process comprising:
extracting, from a second text written in a second language, a second named entity corresponding to a first named entity contained in a first text written in a first language (verification of possibly parallel documents in two different languages is performed using a named entity extraction component 144; para. 0024, 0028, 0038);
associating the first text with the second text based on a similarity between the first named entity and the second named entity and an alignment probability between the first named entity and the second named entity (it is determined that content of the documents are translationally equivalent if the degree of equivalence meets a threshold based on an alignment score; para. 0025-0026); and
outputting association information indicating a result of associating the first text with the second text (if the documents are verified as being parallel documents, the parallel documents are output; para. 0027, 0034).
As to claims 3, 7, 11, Ming discloses: wherein the associating the first text with the second text includes calculating an evaluation index for evaluating a correspondence between the first text and the second text based on the similarity and the alignment probability, and associating the first text with the second text based on a result of comparing the evaluation index with a threshold.
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 (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.
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) 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ming in view of Kumaran et al. (US 8,560,298 B2, “Kumaran”).
Ming discloses: wherein the extracting the second named entity from the second text includes extracting, as the second named entity, one or more words similar to the first named entity from among a plurality of words contained in the second text (named entity extraction component; para. 0024, 0028, 0038), but differs from claims 2, 6, 10 in that it does not disclose:
obtaining an alignment probability between a word contained in the first named entity and a word contained in the second named entity, and
the associating the first text with the second text includes calculating a statistical value of an alignment probability between the word contained in the first named entity and the word contained in the second named entity as the alignment probability between the first named entity and the second named entity.
Kumaran teaches determining similarity between a pair of documents in different languages by using a document probability distribution and measuring the degree of equivalence between a source Named Entity and a target language word (col. 4, line 49 – col. 7, line 9). It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify Ming with the above teaching of Kumaran in order to more effectively identify similar documents from a diverse set of languages, as taught by Kumaran (col. 4, lines 11-33).
As to claims 4, 8, 12, Ming in view of Kumaran teaches: wherein at least one of the first language and the second language is a low-resource language (Kumaran: mining resource-poor languages; col. 13, lines 59-66).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Niu et al. (US 2023/0153542 A1) teach providing cross-lingual sentence alignment with low-resource languages.
Cao et al. (US 2021/0271813 A1) teach acquiring a parallel corpus by determining sentence pairs with alignment degrees greater than a preset alignment degree threshold.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Stella L Woo whose telephone number is (571)272-7512. The examiner can normally be reached Monday - Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Ahmad Matar can be reached at 571-272-7488. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/Stella L. Woo/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2693
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