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 .
Remarks
In response to communication files on July 27, 2026, claims 1, 9, and 17 are amended by applicant's request. Therefore, claims 1-20 are presently pending in the application.
Terminal Disclaimer
The terminal disclaimers filed on July 27, 2026 disclaiming the terminal portion of any patent granted on this application which would extend beyond the expiration date of US Patent No. 12,380,722 has been reviewed and is accepted. The terminal disclaimer has been recorded.
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) 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Gupta (US Pat 10/936,813) (Eff filing date of app: 5/31/2019) in view of Jin et sl. (US Pat. 9,280,747) (Eff filing date of app: 5/27/2015) (Hereinafter Jin).
As to claims 1, 9, and 17, Gupta teaches a method comprising:
receiving a query against a corpus of text strings (see col. 1, ln 61-67 and col. 2, ln 1-2,
“The context-aware spell checker may access or utilize a corpus associated with a particular language or alphabet (e.g., French, English, Dutch, etc.). In some instances, the corpus may comprise a dictionary of characters, words, and/or phrases derived from online resources and/or databases (e.g., databases of movie subtitles, archives of legal documents, websites, electronic books (eBooks), etc.).”);
generating one or more bigrams based on characters of the query, the bigrams
including skip bigrams that comprise non-consecutive characters from the query (see col 2 ln 43-45, “In generating the corpus, the computing devices may also calculate frequency of occurrence for each unique n-gram (e.g., unigram, bigram, trigram, etc.) or token(s) for a particular language”);
determining distances between the bigrams in the hash-map and bigrams of text strings
from the corpus (see col. 3, ln 42-55, “In some instances, the context-aware spell checker may identify candidate suggestions that have an edit distance of less than or equal to two. Generally, the edit distance represents the difference between two strings of characters and the minimum number of edits (i.e., insertions, deletions, transpositions, or substitutions) to change one word into another. An edit distance of zero means the word is spelled correctly. For example, changing the word “coffe” into “coffee” requires one edit—the insertion of “e.” As such, “coffe” and “coffee” may have an edit distance of one. In some instances, limiting the candidate suggestions to an edit distance of two may reduce the amount of candidate suggestions and reduce the amount of time to determine candidate suggestions.”);
selecting one or more text strings from the corpus based on the determined distances (see
fig. 5, character 510 and 512, suggested candidate); and
causing display of the selected text strings as search results (see fig 5, character 522, present candidates).
Gupta does not expressly teach assigning weights to the one or more bigrams each weight assigned to a skip bigram being based on a respective skip order of the skip bigram, the respective skip order corresponding to a number of characters skipped between characters of the skip bigram; generating a hash-map comprising the weighted bigrams, the skip bigrams being keys of the hash-map and the assigned weights being values associated with the keys.
Jin teaches normalizing electronic communication using feature sets, see abstract, in which he teaches assigning weights to the one or more bigrams each weight assigned to a skip bigram being based on a respective skip order of the skip bigram, the respective skip order corresponding to a number of characters skipped between characters of the skip bigram (see col. 1, ln 45-49, “The k-skip-n-gram can comprise a sequence of nonadjacent characters in a communication selected such that a maximum number of skipped characters are positioned between each of the nonadjacent characters in the communication.” And col 2, ln 11-15, “The k-skip-n-gram can comprise a sequence of nonadjacent characters in the communication selected such that a maximum number of skipped characters” see also, col 15, ln 7-27 and col 19, ln 9-18);
generating a hash-map comprising the weighted bigrams, the skip bigrams being keys of the hash-map and the assigned weights being values associated with the keys (see claim 10, jaccard index value).
As to claims 2, 10, and 18, Gupta as modified teaches wherein generating the one or more bigrams further comprises: adding a space character prior to the characters of the query (see Gupta, col 3, ln 47-55, “o change one word into another. An edit distance of zero means the word is spelled correctly. For example, changing the word “coffe” into “coffee” requires one edit—the insertion of “e.” As such, “coffe” and “coffee” may have an edit distance of one. In some instances, limiting the candidate suggestions to an edit distance of two may reduce the amount of candidate suggestions and reduce the amount of time to determine candidate suggestions.”).
As to claims 3, 11, and 19, Gupta as modified teaches wherein the weights assigned to each bigram are represented as 2k, where 2 is a decay parameter and k is the order of the skip-bigram (see Gupta, col. 3, ln 46-47, “edits (i.e., insertions, deletions, transpositions, or substitutions)”).
As to claims 4, 12, and 20, Gupta as modified teaches wherein determining the distances between the bigrams comprises: performing a comparison of the bigram distances with a threshold value (see Gupta, col. 4, ln 25-32, “In some instances, the context-aware spell checker may present candidate suggestions having a cumulative score greater than or equal to a threshold amount or the context-aware spell checker may present a certain number of candidate suggestions (e.g., top five, top ten, etc.). Prioritizing the candidate suggestions may accordingly list words in order that are most natural in the context of the text.”).
As to claims 5 and 13, Gupta as modified teaches wherein causing display of the selected text strings comprises:
determining a ranking of the text strings among the search results based on the determined distances (see Gupta, fig ., character 512, rank candidate); and displaying the text strings based on the ranking (see Gupta, fig. 5, character 522, present candidates).
As to claims 6 and 14, Gupta as modified teaches wherein receiving the query comprises:
receiving a user input comprising the characters (see Gupta, col. 2, ln 41-42, “may be input into the context-aware spell checker by a user.”);
generating the query based on the characters (see Gupta, col. 5, ln 5-9, is used in searches); and
uploading the corpus of text strings to a client device (see Gupta, col. 2, ln 22-53, “The context-aware spell checker may access or utilize a corpus associated with a particular language or alphabet (e.g., French, English, Dutch, etc.). In some instances, the corpus may comprise a dictionary of characters, words, and/or phrases derived from online resources and/or databases (e.g., databases of movie subtitles, archives of legal documents, websites, electronic books (eBooks), etc.). In some instances, the corpus may be generated or compiled by crawling the electronic or web-based documents. For example, computing devices may browse the world wide web using automated and/or trained algorithms to gather and/or process documents to determine characters, words, and/or phrases corresponding to a particular language or alphabet”).
As to claims 7 and 15, Gupta as modified teaches the method further comprising:
appending initials generated based on the characters to the query with a space separator (see Gupta, col. 3, Ln 20-23, “For example, tokenizing word by identifying continuous strings of text that are separated by whitespace (i.e., spaces), punctuation marks (commas, periods, etc.), and/or line breaks.”).
As to claims 8 and 16, Gupta as modified teaches wherein selecting the one or more text strings comprises:
identifying a portion of text strings based on a maximum number of character modifications, wherein the maximum number is proportional to a number of characters in the query (see Gupta, col 3, ln 44-55, “Generally, the edit distance represents the difference between two strings of characters and the minimum number of edits (i.e., insertions, deletions, transpositions, or substitutions) to change one word into another. An edit distance of zero means the word is spelled correctly. For example, changing the word “coffe” into “coffee” requires one edit—the insertion of “e.” As such, “coffe” and “coffee” may have an edit distance of one. In some instances, limiting the candidate suggestions to an edit distance of two may reduce the amount of candidate suggestions and reduce the amount of time to determine candidate suggestions.”).
Response to Arguments
Applicant's arguments with respect to independent claims have been considered but are moot in view of the new ground(s) of rejection necessitated by Applicant’s amendment of the claims.
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 BELIX M ORTIZ DITREN whose telephone number is (571)272-4081. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 9am -5pm.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Amy Ng can be reached at 571-270-1698. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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BELIX M. ORTIZ DITREN
Primary Examiner
Art Unit 2164
/Belix M Ortiz Ditren/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2164
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