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 .
DETAILED ACTION
Response to Amendment
The Amendment filed on May 26, 2026 has been received and entered. Claims 1, 4-6, 8, and 9 have been amended. Claims 10-16 have been newly added. Claims 1-16 are pending for examination.
Rejections and/or objections not reiterated from previous office actions are hereby withdrawn. The following rejections and/or objections are either reiterated or newly applied. They constitute the complete set presently being applied to the instant application.
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, or 365(c) is acknowledged. As required by M.P.E.P. 201.14(c), acknowledgement is made of applicant's claim for priority based on application filed on October 26, 2022 (Japan 2022-171072).
Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies retrieved under 35 U.S.C. 119(a)-(d), which propriety documents have been placed of record in the file.
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 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 of this title, 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.
The factual inquiries set forth in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1, 148 USPQ 459 (1966), that are applied for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claims 1-3, 5, 6 and 9 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Puzicha (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2019/0325031) in view of Perram et al. (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2018/0075138).
Referring to claim 1, Puzicha teaches a computer-implemented method for document processing, wherein the method comprises:
displaying a first document on a document browsing screen (display on a graphical user interface, a list of predictively coded documents. The system can then receive an indication that a portion of the list of predictively coded documents is relevant to a user, see Puzicha, Para. 12. These selected or "pinned" documents are used as input to determine what other documents in a corpus of documents might be of interest to the user, see Puzicha, Para. 14);
retrieving, from a storage medium, a second document that is a document different from the first document and includes information corresponding to attribute information (obtaining a recommended set of documents from a corpus of documents based on the text categorization, see Puzicha, Para. 26) acquired from the first document (a step 110 of applying text categorization to the pinned portion of the list of predictively coded documents, see Puzicha, Para. 26);
displaying the second document on the document browsing screen as a candidate for a related document related to the first document (a step 114 of displaying a recommended set of documents to the user on the graphical user interface, see Puzicha, Para. 28).
However, Puzicha does not explicitly teach
in response to an associating operation for associating the second document with the first document being performed by the user, registering the first document and the second document as related documents in association with each other.
Perram et al. teaches
in response to an associating operation for associating the second document with the first document being performed by the user, registering the first document and the second document as related documents in association with each other (by assigning the document to another doc type category or classification. Database updates will occur and a check performed to ensure that all corrective actions were in fact updated, see Puzicha, Para. 119).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the method of Puzicha, to have in response to an associating operation for associating the second document with the first document being performed by the user, registering the first document and the second document as related documents in association with each other, as taught by Perram et al., to improving the accuracy of the classification system (Perram et al., Para. 107).
As to claim 2, Puzicha as modified teaches the attribute information corresponds to each of a plurality of target items set in advance based on the first document (extracting textual content from each electronic document in the set of electronic documents to identify classification criteria, see Perram et al., Para. 15, the utility performs an analysis of the identified document types from the clustering process and suggests appropriate metadata elements, see Perram et al., Para. 113, and these selected or "pinned" documents are used as input to determine what other documents in a corpus of documents might be of interest to the user, see Puzicha, Para. 14).
As to claim 3, Puzicha as modified teaches wherein the target items include at least one of a title of the first document, a name of a concerned party to the first document, and a contract date of the first document (The term "metadata" as used herein refers to the informational content of various documents or files and may include, for example, the name of a document or file, see Perram et al., Para. 92).
As to claim 5, Puzicha as modified teaches acquiring the attribute information corresponding to the target item from data of the first document at a time of storing the data of the first document in the storage medium (capturing source data for the set of electronic documents from the legacy content repository… extracting textual content from each electronic document in the set of electronic documents, see Perram et al., Para. 15. The electronic document have not been modified from capturing to extracting, so that the he information in the electronic document is the same as the information at the time of storing).
As to claim 6, Puzicha as modified teaches acquiring the attribute information corresponding to the target item from the first document at a time of displaying the first document on the document browsing screen (display on a graphical user interface, a list of predictively coded documents. The system can then receive an indication that a portion of the list of predictively coded documents is relevant to a user, see Puzicha, Para. 12. These selected or "pinned" documents are used as input to determine what other documents in a corpus of documents might be of interest to the user, see Puzicha, Para. 14. Capturing source data for the set of electronic documents from the legacy content repository… extracting textual content from each electronic document in the set of electronic documents, see Perram et al., Para. 15. The reference Puzicha teaches displaying and selected document used as input, so that the extracted textual content corresponding to the target item from the first document at a time of displaying).
Referring to claim 9, Puzicha teaches an information processing system comprising: a storage device (a main memory 10, see Puzicha, Para. 45) configured to store a computer-readable program; and one or more processors (processor or multiple processor(s), see Puzicha, Para. 45) configured to execute the program, wherein by executing the computer-readable program, one or more processors, which recites the corresponding limitations as set forth in claim 1 above; therefore, it is rejected under the same subject matter.
Claim 4 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Puzicha (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2019/0325031) in view of Perram et al. (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2018/0075138) as applied to claims 1-3, 5, 6 and 9 above, and in further view of SHARMA (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2024/0095445).
As to claim 4, Puzicha as modified does not explicitly teach in a case of displaying a plurality of the second documents on the document browsing screen as candidates for the related document, the second documents are displayed in descending order of a degree of association that is calculated based on description content of the second document and the attribute information at a time of retrieving the second document from the storage medium.
SHARMA teaches in a case of displaying a plurality of the second documents on the document browsing screen (client computer having a graphical user interface or an Internet browser, see SHARMA, Para. 65) as candidates for the related document, the second documents are displayed in descending order of a degree of association (list those documents as search results in predefined order (e.g., ascending or descending order) by relevance, see SHARMA, Para. 37) that is calculated based on description content of the second document (given the search terms in the query, see SHARMA, Para. 37) and the attribute information at a time (Upload documents ( e.g., clinical documents) received at computing device 600 may be fed into document processing engine 622 to analyze and classify the documents and provide information and suggestions about the document to a user in real-time, see SHARMA, Para. 61) of retrieving the second document from the storage medium (calculate the cosine similarity between the query and each document within a corpus and generate a search results list, wherein relevant documents are sorted in ascending or descending order, see SHARMA, Para. 37).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the method of Puzicha as modified, to have in a case of displaying a plurality of the second documents on the document browsing screen as candidates for the related document, the second documents are displayed in descending order of a degree of association that is calculated based on description content of the second document and the attribute information at a time of retrieving the second document from the storage medium, as taught by SHARMA, to improve its accuracy and reduce the amount of training time required to complete NLP tasks (SHARMA, Para. 31).
Claim 7 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Puzicha (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2019/0325031) in view of Perram et al. (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2018/0075138) as applied to claims 1-3, 5, 6 and 9 above, and in further view of Finkelstein et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 9,342,601).
As to claim 7, Puzicha as modified does not explicitly teach a first display region in which the second document as a candidate for the related document is displayed and a second display region in which a third document associated with the first document is displayed are separately provided on the document browsing screen.
However, Finkelstein et al. teaches a first display region in which the second document as a candidate for the related document is displayed and a second display region in which a third document associated with the first document is displayed are separately provided on the document browsing screen (indicate multiple documents that are currently displayed in different tabs, see Finkelstein et al., Col. 5, lines 44-45).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the method of Puzicha as modified, to have a first display region in which the second document as a candidate for the related document is displayed and a second display region in which a third document associated with the first document is displayed are separately provided on the document browsing screen, as taught by Finkelstein et al., to assist users in efficiently finding the information they seek (Finkelstein et al., Col. 2, line 58).
Claim 8 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Puzicha (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2019/0325031) in view of Perram et al. (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2018/0075138) as applied to claims 1-3, 5, 6 and 9 above, and in further view of Davis et al. (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2014/0181130).
As to claim 8, Puzicha as modified does not explicitly teach displaying, on the document browsing screen, a list display screen on which extracted information of a single or a plurality of documents stored in the storage medium is checked as a list; and creating a list file including information of another document associated with one or both of the first document and the second document, the list file being downloadable by the user.
However, Davis et al. teaches displaying, on the document browsing screen a list display screen (some of the relevant metadata information for the file or files currently selected may be displayed 404, see Davis et al., Para. 37) on which extracted information of a single or a plurality of the documents (extract differing amounts of metadata depending on the nature of the data file(s), see Davis et al., Para. 28) stored in the storage medium (storage task such that the uploaded file is stored upon the data storage system for future retrieval upon request, see Davis et al., Para. 27) is checked as a list (FIG. 7 shows an illustrative example of a UI for displaying metadata associated with data, see Davis et al., Para. 13); and creating a list file including information of another document (The metadata engine may, in some embodiments, support the importation of extrinsic metadata information via upload of a separate file containing such extrinsic information…attendant files containing only such metadata information, see Davis et al., Para. 29) associated with one or both of the first document and the second document (a step 114 of displaying a recommended set of documents to the user on the graphical user interface, see Puzicha, Para. 28), the list file being downloadable by the user (some or all of the metadata associated with one or more data files, or one or more data sets, may be packaged as a metadata file by, e.g., the metadata engine, and in some embodiments, provided for download upon request through an API, web service and/or the front-end interface, see Davis et al., Para. 29).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the method of Puzicha as modified, to have displaying, on the document browsing screen, a list display screen on which extracted information of a single or a plurality of documents stored in the storage medium is checked as a list; and creating a list file including information of another document associated with one or both of the first document and the second document, the list file being downloadable by the user, as taught by Davis et al., to improve data archival and retrieval (Davis et al., Para. 23).
Claims 10, 11, 12 and 14-16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Puzicha (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2019/0325031) in view of Perram et al. (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2018/0075138) as applied to claims 1-3, 5, 6 and 9 above, and in further view of Casas (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2023/0066506).
As to claim 10, Puzicha as modified does not explicitly teach
in response to the first document being displayed, the second document is displayed as a related document; and in response to the second document being displayed, the first document is displayed as a related document.
However, Casas teaches
in response to the first document being displayed, the second document is displayed as a related document; and in response to the second document being displayed, the first document is displayed as a related document (a display for a document that has been opened by the user, see Casas, Para. 47, previous versions 501 of the same document may also be displayed, such as behind the current version thumbnail image, as shown. The multiple versions of a document will be available via the thumbnails in the appropriate display area, see Casas, Para. 50).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the method of Puzicha as modified, to have in response to the first document being displayed, the second document is displayed as a related document; and in response to the second document being displayed, the first document is displayed as a related document, as taught by Casas, to provide for enhanced and efficient review, commenting, and coding of documents stored in an online database (Casas, Para. 31).
As to claim 11, Puzicha as modified does not explicitly teach the document browsing screen comprises a candidate document display region that displays the second document as a candidate for the related document.
However, Casas teaches the document browsing screen comprises a candidate document display region that displays the second document as a candidate for the related document (a display for a document that has been opened by the user, see Casas, Para. 47, display more than one returned document in different display areas 510 and 520, see Casas, Para. 49 and FIG. 5, previous versions 501 of the same document may also be displayed, such as behind the current version thumbnail image, as shown. The multiple versions of a document will be available via the thumbnails in the appropriate display area, see Casas, Para. 50).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the method of Puzicha as modified, to have the document browsing screen comprises a candidate document display region that displays the second document as a candidate for the related document, as taught by Casas, to provide for enhanced and efficient review, commenting, and coding of documents stored in an online database (Casas, Para. 31).
As to claim 12, Puzicha as modified teaches a document that is already associated with the first document is not displayed in the candidate document display region of the document browsing screen (display more than one returned document in different display areas 510 and 520, see Casas, Para. 49 and FIG. 5).
As to claim 14, Puzicha as modified teaches
the associating operation is an operation of the user selecting a link button corresponding to the second document displayed in the candidate document display region (Documents, with or without the comments of the users (at the users' discretion) can be dropped (via a thumbnail) into the text or linked to the text so that a person reading the text only has to click on the thumbnail or hypertext link to open the document Documents, with or without the comments of the users (at the users' discretion) can be dropped (via a thumbnail) into the text or linked to the text so that a person reading the text only has to click on the thumbnail or hypertext link to open the document, see Casas, Para. 55).
As to claim 15, Puzicha as modified does not explicitly teach the first document and the second document are documents related to a contract.
However, Casas teaches the first document and the second document are documents related to a contract (D:/Contracls, NDA CONFIDENTIAL AGREEMENT MUTUAL, NDA AGREEMENT NON-MUTUAL, see Casas, FIG. 5).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the method of Puzicha as modified, to have the first document and the second document are documents related to a contract, as taught by Casas, to provide for enhanced and efficient review, commenting, and coding of documents stored in an online database (Casas, Para. 31).
As to claim 16, Puzicha as modified does teaches
the first document is a contract (510, see Casas, FIG. 5); and
the second document is a memorandum relating to the contract or a document modifying at least a part of the contract (520, see Casas, FIG. 5).
Claim 13 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Puzicha (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2019/0325031) in view of Perram et al. (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2018/0075138) as applied to claims 1-3, 5, 6 and 9 above, and in further view of DeLuca et al. (U.S. Pat. Pub. 2022/0092665).
As to claim 13, Puzicha as modified does not explicitly teach
in response to no document associated with the first document existing, displaying a notification in a related document display region of the document browsing screen.
DeLuca et al. teaches
in response to no document associated with the first document existing, displaying a notification in a related document display region of the document browsing screen (notification program 106 may display the message in place of a notification that the content was not found, such as an error message that states, "the result count is zero”, see DeLuca et al., Para. 23 ).
Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to modify the method of Puzicha as modified, to have in response to no document associated with the first document existing, displaying a notification in a related document display region of the document browsing screen, as taught by DeLuca et al., to recognize that efficiency may be gained by providing an alert to a user when content (DeLuca et al., Para. 10).
Response to Argument
Applicant’s remarks filed on 5/26/2026 with respect to claim 1 and 9 have been considered but they are moot in view of the new ground(s) of rejection.
Conclusion
Applicant's amendment necessitated the new ground(s) of rejection presented in this Office action. Accordingly, THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. See MPEP § 706.07(a). 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.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JAU SHYA MENG whose telephone number is (571)270-1634. The examiner can normally be reached 9AM-5PM EST M-F.
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, Charles Rones can be reached at 571-272-4085. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/JAU SHYA MENG/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2168
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