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 .
This action is in response to the communication filed on August 22, 2024.
Claims 1-20 are pending in this action.
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 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to a judicial exception (i.e., law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea) without significantly more. The claim(s) recite(s) an abstract idea of event grounding method. The claim(s) does/do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because the claims directed to an abstract idea of event grounding. The claim is drawn to process/system (a series of steps or acts) that similar to an idea ‘Of itself such as an instantiated concept, plan or scheme, as well as a mental process (thinking) that “can be performed in the human mind, or by a human using a pen and paper’.
The claim does not require that the method be implemented by a particular machine. The method does not require a particular transformation of a particular article. There is not transformation of a physical objects or data into a different state or thing. This event grounding method/system is similar to delivering user-selected media content to a portable devices found by the courts to be abstract idea (Affinity Labs of Tex., LLC v. Amazon.com Inc., 120 USPQ2d 1210 (Fed. Cir. 2016)) and also displaying certain results of the collection and analysis found by the courts to be abstract idea (Elec. Power Grp., LLC v. Alstom S.A., 119 USPQ2d 1739 (Fed. Cir. 2016).
This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because claims broadly recites the result (event grounding method/system, semantic parsing, event abstraction, utilizing an knowledge graph, and generate prediction), rather than sufficiently claiming a technical means of achieving the result. See Two-Way Media Ltd. v. Comcast Cable Commons, LLC, 874 F.3d 1329, 1337 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (“The claim requires the functional results ... but does not sufficiently describe how to achieve these results in a non-abstract way.”).
The claims recite a Judicial exception relating to “event grounding method/system, along with a generic GPU device that simply used as tool to implement the abstract idea (claim 11)”. Here the claims do not change the underlying or other technology, rather the claimed techniques playing using computing device as pedagogical tool. The claimed additional elements - -the computing device - -(GPU)- -“merely use a computer as a tool to perform an abstract idea” or “do no more than generally link the use of a judicial exception to a particular technological environment.” Memorandum, 84 Fed. Reg. at 55; see Customedia Techs., LLC v. Dish Network Corp., No. 2018- 2239, 2020 WL 1069742, at *3 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 6, 2020) (“We have held that it is not enough, however, to merely improve a fundamental practice or abstract process by invoking a computer merely as a tool.”).
Accordingly, claims 1-20 do not integrate the judicial exception into a practical application. See Memorandum, 84 Fed. Reg. at 54. As the claim recites a judicial exception and fails to integrate the exception into a practical application, the claim is “directed to the .. . judicial exception.” Id. at 54.
The claim(s) does/do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because the additional elements are simply a generic processor (GPU). The claim amounts to no more than event grounding. Taking the claimed elements either individually or as ordered combination, that transform claims into patent-eligible application, since claims merely recite use of already existing computer-based event grounding, and there is no “inventive concept” in play using computing device (GPU) well- understood, routine, and conventional activities commonly used in industry of event grounding, since claims, at most, attempt to limit abstract idea to particular technological environment, and such limitation has been held insufficient to save claims in this context, and since dependent claims are not rendered patent-eligible by recitation of additional steps, such as claims 2 and 12, event extraction and event normalization; Claims 3 and 13, extracts verb-centric events; claims 4 and 14, replaces a plurality of first tokens in the verb-centric events with a plurality of second tokens; claims 5 and 15, dropping the arguments of each verb-centric event according to their importance; claims 6 and 16, grounds the abstract events to a plurality of nodes in the vent-centric KG; even though additional limitations may narrow scope of claims. The claim as a whole does not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea itself. Accordingly, claims 1-20, are ineligible.
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.
Claim(s) 1-20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Ho et al. (US 10,019,437) in view of Zhou et al. (Modeling events-pair relations in external knowledge graphs for script reasoning).
As per claim 1, Ho discloses, an event grounding method, comprising:
event acquisition from an input free-text using semantic parsing through an event grounding system and acquiring a plurality of verb-centric events (col. 7, lines 25-col. 8, line 26, “parse tree”, “every verb is exposed as an “action””);
event abstraction through the event grounding system and acquiring a plurality of abstract events (col. 6, line 59-col. 7, line 5, “using semantic abstraction based on translating natural-language parses into a collection of actions, roles and complimentary concepts using dependency parse trees”).
Ho fails to teach but Zhou discloses, the event grounding system grounds the abstract events to a plurality of anchor events of an event-centric Knowledge Graph (KG) (Section 3.2. Script-Adaptive Knowledge Model);
reasoning a subgraph by the event grounding system through a reasoning model (Section 3.3. Script Reasoning Model); and
generate a prediction, wherein the subgraph includes the abstract events and the anchor events (Section 3.3. Script Reasoning Model).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Ho by including event-centric Knowledge Graph as taught by Zhou for the advantage of script reasoning infers subsequent events from a given event chain, which involves the ability to understand relations between events (Abstract).
As per claim 2, Ho discloses, wherein the event acquisition includes: event extraction, and event normalization (Fig. 4, element 411).
As per claim 3, Ho discloses, wherein the event acquisition includes: the event grounding system extracts the verb-centric events from the free-text, and every verb-centric event includes a trigger verb and a set of arguments, and each of the argument has a semantic role (col. 7, line42-col. 8, line 34).
As per claim 4, Ho discloses, wherein the event acquisition includes: the event grounding system replaces a plurality of first tokens in the verb-centric events with a plurality of second tokens, and every first token refers to a person, and every second token refers to one or more of the first tokens referring to the same person (col. 9, lines 20-44).
As per claim 5, Ho disclose, wherein the event abstraction includes: the event grounding system dropping the arguments of each verb-centric event according to their importance; and acquire the abstract events (col. 7, line42-col. 8, line 34).
As per claim 6, Ho fails to teach but Zhou discloses, wherein the event grounding system grounds the abstract events to a plurality of nodes in the even-centric KG, and the event grounding system acquires the anchor events from the nodes, and every abstract event is linked to one or a plurality of the anchor events (Section 3.3. Script Reasoning Model).
As per claim 7, Ho discloses, wherein the event grounding system acquires the subgraph, and the subgraph includes all the anchor events, the abstract events and the verb-centric events (col. 7, line42-col. 8, line 34).
As per claim 8, Ho fails to teach but Zhou discloses, wherein the event grounding system employs a GNN module to perform reasoning on the subgraph (Section 3.3. Script Reasoning Model).
As per claim 9, Ho discloses, wherein all the words in the events are lemmatized (col. 8, lines 43-56).
As per claim 10, Ho discloses, wherein, while processing the first and second tokens, a plurality of spans of words are detected by syntactic parsing and animacy classification, and the event grounding system employ the co-reference information between these spans to normalize all spans that refer to persons and generate the second tokens (col. 8, lines 43-56).
As per claims 11, Ho discloses, an event grounding system, comprising:
an input device (Fig. 4, element 401 as input);
an output device (Fig. 4, element 450);
a processor connecting the input device, the output device, and the graphic processing unit (Fig. 4),
wherein the event grounding system receives a free-text through the input device, and the processor performs an event grounding to the free-text through the
Ho fails to teach but Zhou discloses,
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Ho by including event-centric Knowledge Graph as taught by Zhou for the advantage of script reasoning infers subsequent events from a given event chain, which involves the ability to understand relations between events (Abstract).
Ho discloses, computer system/server and processing unit (Fig. 1, element 16), but does not explicitly disclose GPU. GPU is well-known in the art.
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to modify the invention of Ho by including GPU interchangeably with Processing unit for the advantage of performing mathematical calculations at high speed, computing tasks like graphics rendering, machine learning and video editing require the application of similar mathematical operations on a large dataset.
As per claims 12-20, they are analyzed and thus rejected for the same reasons set forth in the rejections of claims 2-10, because the corresponding claims have similar limitations.
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
Nguyen (US 2016/0042058) disclose, processing natural-language documents and queries.
Boschee et al. (US 2009/0100053) discloses, semantic matching using predicate-argument structure.
Contact Information
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Abul K. Azad whose telephone number is (571) 272-7599. If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner's supervisor, Bhavesh Mehta, can be reached at (571) 272-7453.
Any response to this action should be mailed to:
Commissioner for Patents
P.O. Box 1450
Alexandria, VA 22313-1450
Or faxed to: (571) 273-8300.
Hand-delivered responses should be brought to 401 Dulany Street, Alexandria, VA-22314 (Customer Service Window).
Information regarding the status of an application may be obtained from the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system. Status information for published applications may be obtained from either Private PAIR or Public PAIR. Status information for unpublished applications is available through Private PAIR only. For more information about the PAIR system, see http://pair-direct.uspto.gov. Should you have questions on access to the Private PAIR system, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free).
April 10, 2026
/ABUL K AZAD/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2656
Prosecution Insights