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 .
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 7 May 2026 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Claims 1-20 are pending.
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments filed 7 April 2026 regarding the claimed priority have been fully considered but they are not persuasive.
Regarding argument 1 at page 7 of the response, the examiner is not persuaded. In fact the word “tree” cited by applicant is the single occurrence in the entire specification. Therefore the examiner maintains “defining a first tree data structure” and “defining a second tree data structure” are not supported by the specification.
Regarding argument 2 at page 8 of the response, the examiner is not persuaded. Throughout the specification no “candidate answers” is found. The specification discusses at length “candidate components” of possible pairing terms which is not equivalent to the claimed candidate answers to a query.
Regarding argument 3 at page 9 of the response, the examiner is not persuaded. Determining a strength of association by distance between the nodes is not same as assigning weights to the edges now claimed.
Regarding argument 4 at page 10 of the response, the examiner is not persuaded. Ranking according to the specification paragraphs [0016], [0035], [0105], is merely related to possible meanings of the query based on user preferences. No discussion of any candidate answers or any sum of values associated with first subset of nodes and second subset of nodes as claimed.
Applicant presents no further argument except the Lu reference is not prior art. The examiner disagrees and maintains the specification as originally filed does not support the claimed features discussed above.
Priority
Applicant's claim for the benefit of a prior-filed application under 35 U.S.C. 119(e) or under 35 U.S.C. 120, 121, 365(c), or 386(c) is acknowledged. Applicant has not complied with one or more conditions for receiving the benefit of an earlier filing date under 35 U.S.C. 120 as follows:
The later-filed application must be an application for a patent for an invention which is also disclosed in the prior application (the parent or original nonprovisional application or provisional application). The disclosure of the invention in the parent application and in the later-filed application must be sufficient to comply with the requirements of 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or the first paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, except for the best mode requirement. See Transco Products, Inc. V. Performance Contracting, Inc., 38 F.3d 551, 32 USPQ2d 1077 (Fed. Cir. 1994). The disclosure of the earliest prior-filed application, Application No. 15095833, fails to provide adequate support or enablement in the manner provided by 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, first paragraph for one or more claims of this application. The prior filed application does not support at least the now claimed subset of the nodes, defining a first tree data structure, defining a second tree data structure, determine a plurality of candidate answers to a received query based on distances between nodes of the first subset and distance between nodes of the second subset, assigning weights to edges, ranking candidate answers based on sums of values associated with first subset of nodes and second subset of nodes.
This application repeats a substantial portion of prior Application No. 15095833, filed 11 April 2016, and adds disclosure not presented in the prior application. Because this application names the inventor or at least one joint inventor named in the prior application, it may constitute a continuation-in-part of the prior application. Should applicant desire to claim the benefit of the filing date of the prior application, attention is directed to 35 U.S.C. 120, 37 CFR 1.78, and MPEP § 211 et seq. The presentation of a benefit claim may result in an additional fee under 37 CFR 1.17(w)(1) or (2) being required, if the earliest filing date for which benefit is claimed under 35 U.S.C. 120, 121, 365(c), or 386(c) and 1.78(d) in the application is more than six years before the actual filing date of the application.
In the interest of compact prosecution, this application is being examined as entitled only to its filing date of 16 August 2024 for all the features that are not supported by its parent application.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112(a):
(a) IN GENERAL.—The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor or joint inventor of carrying out the invention.
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112:
The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), first paragraph, as failing to comply with the written description requirement. The claim(s) contains subject matter which was not described in the specification in such a way as to reasonably convey to one skilled in the relevant art that the inventor or a joint inventor, or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the inventor(s), at the time the application was filed, had possession of the claimed invention.
The specification as originally filed does not support at least the following claimed elements: subset of the nodes, defining a first tree data structure, defining a second tree data structure, determine a plurality of candidate answers to a received query based on distances between nodes of the first subset and distance between nodes of the second subset, assigning weights to edges, ranking candidate answers based on sums of values associated with first subset of nodes and second subset of nodes.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
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 1-20 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 applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
The specification as originally filed does not support at least the following claimed elements: subset of the nodes, defining a first tree data structure, defining a second tree data structure, determine a plurality of candidate answers to a received query based on distances between nodes of the first subset and distance between nodes of the second subset, assigning weights to edges, ranking candidate answers based on sums of values associated with first subset of nodes and second subset of nodes.
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.
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 1-20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Lu, Xiaolu, et al. "Answering complex questions by joining multi-document evidence with quasi knowledge graphs." Proceedings of the 42nd international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval. 2019. of record.
Regarding claim 1, Lu discloses, teaches or suggests a computer- implemented method, comprising
receiving, via an interface, a query (see 1.3 Approach and Contribution, first paragraph: a method and system called QUEST (for "QUEstion answering with Steiner Trees" that taps into text sources for answers, but also integrates considerations from the KG-QA (also referred to as KB-QA) paradigm.),
accessing a knowledge graph comprising a plurality of nodes, wherein each node of the plurality of nodes represents an entity and is connected to at least one other node via an edge, and wherein presence of an edge indicates association between entities of nodes connected by the edge (see 1.3 Approach and Contribution, first paragraph);
defining, based on the knowledge graph, at least a first tree data structure and a second tree data structure, wherein the first tree data structure comprises a first subset of the plurality of nodes, and the second tree data structure comprises a second subset of the plurality of nodes (see 1.3 Approach and Contribution, second paragraph Group Steiner Tree (GST) with cornerstones as terminals, Fig.1 all red nodes and edges, and all blue nodes and edges, constitute two GSTs, respectively yielding the answers);
using the first tree data structure and the second tree data structure to determine a plurality of candidate answers to the query based on distances between nodes of the first subset and distances between nodes of the second subset (see 1.3 Approach and Contribution, second paragraph: Fig. 1, all red nodes and edges, and all blue nodes and edges, constitute two GSTs, respectively yielding the answers);
ranking the plurality of candidate answers based at least in part on the distances between nodes of the first subset and the distances between nodes of the second subset (see 1.3 Approach and Contribution, second paragraph: answers are filtered and ranked by whether they are compatible with the question's lexical answer type and other criteria); and
outputting, as an answer to the query, at least one of the plurality of candidate answers based on the ranking (see 2. System Overview, Answering pipeline, page 106 right col. last paragraph - page 107 left col. Step (2b) Filtering and scoring candidates to produce ranked answers.
Regarding claim 2, Lu further teaches the method of claim 1, wherein: a particular candidate answer of the plurality of candidate answers corresponds to a particular node of the plurality of nodes (see 1.3 Approach and Contribution, page 106, 2ⁿᵈ paragraph: Good answers among the nodes of the quasi-KG should be well connected with all nodes that (approximately) match the phrases from the input question. We refer to these matching nodes as cornerstones (nodes with thick borders in Fig. 1). This criterion can be cast; into computing Group Steiner Trees (GST) with the cornerstones as terminals [26]. All non-terminal nodes of the trees are candidate answers. This computation is carried out over a weighted graph, with weights based on matching scores and extraction confidences. Finally, answers are filtered and ranked by whether they are compatible with the question's lexical answer type and other criteria);
and the particular candidate answer is ranked, and output as the answer to the query, further based on the particular node being connected via one or more edges to one or more nodes that correspond to one or more portions of the query. (see 2. System Overview pages 106-107 Answering pipeline).
Regarding claim 3, Lu further teaches the method of claim 2, wherein the query comprises a plurality of portions corresponding to a plurality of entities of the plurality of nodes (see 2. System Overview page 106 Complex questions).
Regarding claim 4, Lu further teaches the method of claim 2, wherein the one or more edges are assigned respective weights based on strengths of association between the particular node and a corresponding node of the one or more nodes (see page 108 left col. Edge weights).
Regarding claim 5, Lu further teaches the method of claim 4, wherein:
the strengths of association are based on one or more distances between the particular node and the respective one or more nodes (see 4.2, Filtering and Ranking Answers, last paragraph: Answer scoring. After aggregation, answers are scored and ranked by exploiting their presence in multiple GSTs. However, instead of simple counts, we consider a weighted sum by considering the inverses of the tree cost as the weight for a GST. We examine effects of alternatives like total node weights in these GSTs, and distances of answers to cornerstones, in our empirical analysis later (Sec. 7));
a first weight is assigned to a first edge associated with a first distance from the particular node (see Node Weights page 108 left col.) and
a second weight is assigned to a second edge associated with a second distance from the particular node, wherein the first weight is set to be higher than the second weight based on the first distance being shorter than the second distance (see 4.1.second paragraph: Group Steiner Trees. The key idea for identifying answer candidates is that these nodes should be tightly connected to many cornerstones. To formalize this intuition, we consider three factors: (i) answers lie on paths connecting cornerstones, (ii) short paths are preferred, and (iii) paths with higher weights are better).
Regarding claim 6, Lu further teaches the method of claim 4, wherein ranking the plurality of candidate answers further comprises ranking the plurality of candidate answers in ascending order based on strengths of respective nodes, corresponding to the plurality of candidate answers, to the one or more nodes that correspond to one or more portions of the query (see 4.1 second paragraph: Group Steiner Trees. The key idea for identifying answer candidates is that these nodes should be tightly connected to many cornerstones. To formalize this intuition, we consider three factors: (i) answers lie on paths connecting cornerstones, (ii) short paths are preferred, and (iii) paths with higher weights are better).
Regarding claim 7, Lu further teaches the method of claim 1, wherein ranking the plurality of candidate answers is based at least in part on one or more sums of values associated with the first subset of the plurality of nodes and the second subset of the plurality of nodes (see 1.3 Approach and Contribution second paragraph: We refer to these matching nodes as cornerstones (nodes with thick borders in Fig. 1). This criterion can be cast into computing Group Steiner Trees (GST) with the cornerstones as terminals [26]. All non-terminal nodes of the trees are candidate answers. This computation is carried out over a weighted graph, with weights based on matching scores and extraction confidences. Finally, answers are filtered and ranked by whether they are compatible with the question's lexical answer type and other criteria).
Regarding claim 8, Lu further teaches the method of claim 1, wherein ranking the plurality of candidate answers further comprises ranking the plurality of candidate answers in descending order of the distances, and the answer that is output corresponds to a candidate answer associated with a shortest distance of the distances (see 5.4 page 110 Baselines and Metrics, third paragraph: An answer is scored by the numbers of different shortest paths that it lies on, and ranked in descending order of these scores.).
Regarding claim 9, Lu further teaches the method of claim 1, wherein ranking the plurality of candidate answers further comprises comparing the distances to a threshold, and the answer that is output corresponds to a candidate answer associated with a distance, from among the distances, that is below the threshold (see 3.1 last paragraph Proximity-based scoring, 4.1 Computing Group Steiner Trees, Cornerstones. To find answers in the quasi KG, we first identify pivotal nodes that we call cornerstones: every node that matches a word or phrase in the question, with similarity above a threshold, becomes a cornerstone, 4.2 Answer filtering: Candidates that do not have types with similarity above a threshold are dropped.).
Regarding claim 10, Lu further teaches the method of claim 1, wherein the query is received as a voice query (see 1.1 Motivation voice search becomes ubiquitous).
Claims 11-20 essentially recite limitations similar to claims 1-10 in form of systems thus are rejected for the same reasons discussed in claim 1-10 above.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Lastras-Montano et al (US 20170076206 A1) teach mechanisms for performing a cognitive operation. The mechanisms receive an original graph data structure comprising nodes and edges between nodes and activity log information for nodes of the original graph data structure. The mechanisms identify a set of nodes in the original graph data structure having a predetermined pattern of activity in the activity log information, and a set of edges between these nodes. The mechanisms calculate an importance weight for each edge in the set of edges and modify the original graph data structure based on the calculated importance weights for the edges in the set of edges, to thereby generate a modified graph data structure. The mechanisms then perform a cognitive operation based on the modified graph data structure. The set of edges may comprise actual edges between the nodes and/or potential edges between the nodes.
Benitez et al (US 9213745 B1) teach methods, systems, and media for ranking content items using topics. In some embodiments, a method for ranking video content is provided, comprising: receiving a search query; generating a plurality of search results in response to the search query; determining one or more entity types associated with a content class within the plurality of search results; determining whether the search query is a query for content belonging to the content class based on a plurality of criterion that includes: (i) determining whether at least one of the plurality of search results is associated with the one or more determined entity types and (ii) determining whether entities shared between the plurality of search results include the one or more determined entity types; and in response to determining that the plurality of criterion have been met, promoting at least one search result of the plurality of search results belonging to the content class.
Kasneci, Gjergji. "Searching and ranking in entity-relationship graphs." (2009). 134 pages.
Abstract- The Web bears the potential to become the world’s most comprehensive knowledge base. Organizing information from the Web into entity-relationship graph structures could be a first step towards unleashing this potential. In a second step, the inherent semantics of such structures would have to be exploited by expressive search techniques that go beyond today’s keyword search paradigm. In this realm, as a first contribution of this thesis, we present NAGA (Not Another Google Answer), a new semantic search engine. NAGA provides an expressive, graph-based query language that enables queries with entities and relationships. The results are retrieved based on subgraph matching techniques and ranked by means of a statistical ranking model. As a second contribution, we present STAR (Steiner Tree Approximation in Relationship Graphs), an efficient technique for finding “close” relations (i.e., compact connections) between k(≥ 2) entities of interest in large entity-relationship graphs. Our third contribution is MING (Mining Informative Graphs). MING is an efficient method for retrieving “informative” subgraphs for k(≥ 2) entities of interest from an entity-relationship graph. Intuitively, these would be subgraphs that can explain the relations between the k entities of interest. The knowledge discovery tasks supported by MING have a stronger semantic flavor than the ones supported by STAR. STAR and MING are integrated into the query answering component of the NAGA engine. NAGA itself is a fully implemented prototype system and is part of the YAGO NAGA project.
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
/UYEN T LE/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2156 11 June 2026
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