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 Office action is issued in response to application, 19/469,810, filed on 9/26/2025, and the preliminary amendment, filed on 9/26/2025.
Claim(s) 1-20 was/were presented in the application, filed on 9/26/2025.
Claim(s) 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19 and 20 has/have been amended by the preliminary amendment, filed on 9/26/2025.
Claim(s) 1-20 is/are pending.
Priority
Acknowledgment is made of applicant’s claim for priority to PCT/US2024/021593, filed on 3/27/2024, which claims priority to provisional application, 63/454,799, filed on 3/27/2023.
Specification
The title of the invention is not descriptive. A new title is required that is clearly indicative of the invention to which the claims are directed.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement(s) (IDS), submitted on 9/26/2025, is/are in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement(s) is/are being considered by the examiner.
Response to Amendment
Applicant’s amendment(s) to claim(s) 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19 and 20, by the preliminary amendment, filed on 9/26/2025, has/have been accepted.
Claim Objections
Claim 1 is objected to because of the following informalities: in line 9, “combined terms;” should be corrected to “combined search terms;”;
in line 11, “conduct the search” should be corrected to “conduct a search”;
in line 12, “search term;” should be corrected to “search terms;”;
in line 16, “count the number” should be corrected to “count a number”;
in line 17, “including words;” should be corrected to “including the words;”; and
in lines 18-19, “on user graphical user interface” should be corrected to “on a graphical user interface” (i.e., to match language in dependent claims of “graphical user interface”). Appropriate correction is required.
Claim 3 is objected to because of the following informalities: in lines 1-2, “further comprising further comprising executable” should be corrected to “further combining executable”. Appropriate correction is required.
Claim 8 is objected to because of the following informalities: in line 3, “on input” should be corrected to “on an input”. Appropriate correction is required.
Claim 9 is objected to because of the following informalities: in line 6, “combined terms;” should be corrected to “combined search terms;”;
in line 8, “conduct the search” should be corrected to “conduct a search”;
in line 9, “search term;” should be corrected to “search terms;”;
in line 13, “count the number” should be corrected to “count a number”;
in line 14, “including words;” should be corrected to “including the words;”; and
in lines 15-16, “on user graphical user interface” should be corrected to “on a graphical user interface” (i.e., to match language in dependent claims of “graphical user interface”). Appropriate correction is required.
Claim 16 is objected to because of the following informalities: in line 2, “on input” should be corrected to “on an input”. Appropriate correction is required.
Claim 17 is objected to because of the following informalities: in line 7, “combined terms;” should be corrected to “combined search terms;”;
in line 9, “conduct the search” should be corrected to “conduct a search”;
in line 10, “search term;” should be corrected to “search terms;”;
in line 14, “count the number” should be corrected to “count a number”;
in line 15, “including words;” should be corrected to “including the words;”; and
in lines 16-17, “on user graphical user interface” should be corrected to “on a graphical user interface” (i.e., to match language in dependent claims of “graphical user interface”). Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
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.
Claim(s) 4 and 15 is/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.
Claim 4 recites depending upon itself in line 2, “… to perform the steps of claim 4 …”; however, claim 4 does not add any additional steps. This makes the claim indefinite and is rejected for that reason.
Claim 15 recites the limitation "the system" in lines 1-2. There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim (and in the parent claim).
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 Chong et al., US 2018/0365317 A1 (hereinafter “Chong”) in view of Lowe et al., US 2017/0293676 A1 (hereinafter “Lowe”).
Claims 1, 9 and 17
Chong discloses a system for performing unstructured search using natural language processing, comprising:
a memory comprising executable instructions (Chong, [0020], "In one embodiment, with reference to FIG. 1, the system 100 includes a server device 110 configured to include a processor 112, such as a central processing unit ("CPU"), random access memory ("RAM") 114"); and
a processor (Chong, [0020], see central processing unit) configured to execute the executable instructions and cause the system to:
receive a natural language search query comprising a search term from a user (Cong, [0032], "The exemplary method begins with the receipt of an initiated user search query comprising one or more search terms at the graphical user interface 164 of the access device 160, step 210. For example, a user is provided a graphical user interface that provides a field for the user to enter a question. In one embodiment, the user enters the question in natural language format. For example, a user may enter the search query comprising a single search term "drones.");
combine search terms and generate a search query specific to a search engine using the combined terms (Chong, [0033], "In one embodiment, a suggestion process may include expansion of the search query using well known techniques in the field, including but not limited to stemming techniques, tokenization, Word2Vec and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). Continuing from the previous example for the search query comprising the single search term "drones," stemming techniques may be used to expand search query to include the terms "drone" and "drones," and Word2Vec modeling can be used to generate the Word2Vec terms "remotely-piloted," "remotely-piloted-aircraft-systems," and "RPA" for expansion of the search query. Additionally, a suggestion process can also include the suggestion of secondary or alternate search terms by the suggestion module 124. Continuing from the previous example, search terms "Unmanned-aerial-vehicles" and "Unmanned-aerial-vehicle" are also included in the expanded search query.", Chong, [0039], "The exemplary method begins with the receipt of an initiated user search query comprising one or more search terms at the graphical user interface 164 of the access device 160, step 310. For example, a user is provided a graphical user interface that provides a field for the user to enter a question. In one embodiment, the user enters the question in natural language format.");
run the search query using the search engine, whereby the search engine accesses a repository of unstructured documents to conduct the search to find occurrences of the search term (Chong, [0036], "According to one embodiment, the clustering module 126 groups the responsive documents, according to a variety of factors including, but not limited to (i) matching keywords, (ii) matching subjects, (iii) matching entities, (iv) matching unstructured text, (v) use of TF-IDF to relate important terms, (vi) matching authorship, (vii) matching quotes, (viii) matching or related dates, (ix) volume of documents, (x) tagging relationships and (xi) direct connections/references between documents.", Chong, [0037], According to one embodiment, statistical modeling, such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) statistical modeling, is used on the unstructured text of the individual documents to identify a relevant topic for each document cluster. For example, a subset of the responsive documents to the search term "drones" that indicate future development may be clustered on the basis that the subset of responsive documents contained the matching person entity, "David Cameron." Using LDA modeling, a topic for the subset of documents could is identified as "Government and European Focus" based on the statistical modeling performed on the unstructured text of each document. Table 3 illustrates the relevant unstructured text of each document used to generate the relevant topic of "Government and European Focus."");
Chong does not appear to explicitly disclose produce search results comprising a plurality of fragments, wherein each fragment includes the search term plus a predetermined number of words before and after the search term as appearing in each occurrence of the search term;
remove unwanted fragments and count the number of times remaining fragments of documents including words;
modify the search results as appropriate for display on user graphical user interface; and
deliver modified search results to the graphical user interface.
Lowe discloses produce search results comprising a plurality of fragments, wherein each fragment includes the search term plus a predetermined number of words before and after the search term as appearing in each occurrence of the search term (Lowe, [0048], "As shown in FIG, 1, in some embodiments, before search results are presented, some embodiments may select narrowing terms that pertain to respective subsets of the responsive documents, as indicated by Block 16. Examples of narrowing terms are the items shown in region 44 and selectable through faceted inputs 42 in FIGS. 3 and 4. In some embodiments, the narrowing terms are topics, entities mentioned, keywords, or metadata attributes of the documents in the corpa (or other data set), and the like. The terms are narrowing because they only pertain to a subset of the documents and when selected are used to identify a subset of the documents. A narrowing term may also pertain to documents outside of the search results, but the term does not become broadening merely in virtue of this fact. Rather, it is the combination of the term pertaining to a subset of the documents, and the term being used to identify that subset that makes the term a narrowing term.", Lowe, [0080], "In some embodiments, to measure relationships between documents (or other larger language units, like paragraphs), each document may be represented by a feature vector in which each value of the vector indicates the presence, number of occurrences, or frequency of an n-gram in the document. N-grams are sequences of one or more terms, e.g., "the" is an example of an n-gram where n=1, "the quick" is another n-gram where n=2, and "the quick brown fox jumped" is another where n=5. In some cases, relatively uninformative terms, like stop words ("the," "a," and "an" being common examples), or terms detected with term-frequency inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) scoring may be omitted.", Lowe, [0081], "To calculate TF-IDF for a given n-gram, some embodiments may count the number of times the n-gram occurs within a given document and the number of other n-grams in the document before calculating a frequency with which the term occurs within the document. Some embodiments may also count the number of times the n-gram occurs in a larger collection of documents, such as the analyzed corpus of a sampling thereof, as well as the total number of terms in the larger collection of documents to calculate another frequency with which the term appears in the larger collection of documents.", Lowe, [0091], "For instance, document text may be represented in a co-occurrence matrix, where rows represent n-grams, columns represent adjacent n-grams (like within a threshold number of words in the text), or vice versa, and values represent presence, number, or frequency of instances in which corresponding terms are determined to be adjacent one another in the text.");
remove unwanted fragments and count the number of times remaining fragments of documents including words (Lowe, [0028], "Further, some embodiments may embed these tools in a larger graphical user interface with filters that are combinable with the queries and snippets of text and statistics that allow the user to quickly visually parse whether a query requires refinement to reach their desired results.", Lowe, [0046], "In some embodiments, the graphical element includes text corresponding to the text of the query element and an input 56 by which the query element may be removed from the query upon user's selection. In some embodiments, the query editing input further includes a query submit input 58 that causes the corresponding query to be sent to a server and executed.", Lowe, [0049], "Narrowing terms (which may be, e.g., n-grams, qualitative metadata attributes, and quantitative metadata attributes) may be identified with a variety of techniques. In some embodiments, narrowing terms are keywords appearing in the documents. Examples of potentially relevant keywords may be obtained with various techniques, for example, responsive to term frequency inverse document frequency exceeding a threshold, with named entity recognition algorithms, topic extraction algorithms, and the like, being executed on the responsive documents.");
modify the search results as appropriate for display on user graphical user interface (Lowe, [0057], "FIG. 6 shows a modified query 72 after selection of the negative conjunctive Boolean option in menu 70. As illustrated, a Boolean operator 74 and the item 76 have been added to the query. In some embodiments, a user may submit this refine query (e.g., by selecting the magnifying glass icon) and receive different results or further edit the query (e.g., by selecting more terms or by typing in more terms)."); and
deliver modified search results to the graphical user interface (Lowe, [0039], "To this end, some embodiments may present search results in graphical user interfaces like those illustrated in FIGS. 3 and 4, or in the force directed graph representations described below in some cases, presenting graphical user interfaces may be performed by sending instructions to a client device that cause the client device to prepare and render a display (e.g., a graphical, haptic, or audible stimulus).").
Chong and Lowe are analogous art because they are from the same field of endeavor of searching data.
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention, having the teachings of Chong and Lowe before him/her, to modify the system for performing unstructured search using natural language processing by Chong to include the search results comprising a plurality of fragments of Lowe because it allow additional search capabilities.
The suggestion/motivation for doing so would have been to help a user formulate multiple queries and adjusting the queries, see Lowe, [0009].
Therefore, it would have been obvious to combine Lowe with Chong to obtain the invention as specified in the instant claim(s).
Claim(s) 9 and 17 recite(s) similar limitations to claim 1 and is/are rejected under the same rationale.
With respect to claim 17, Chong discloses a non-transitory computer readable medium comprising instructions (Chong, [0020], see non-volatile memory).
Claims 2, 10 and 18
With respect to claims 2, 10 and 18, the combination of Chong and Lowe discloses wherein the search engine is elastisearch (Chong, [0034], "Returning to FIG. 2, according to one embodiment, the expanded search query is executed by the query module 122 against one or more databases, such as the news content data store 150, the news content data store 150, the legal content data store 160 and the supplemental content data store 170, and one or more documents are identified that are responsive to the expanded search query, step 230. According to one embodiment, the one or more responsive documents are stored in the combined content data store 132, which for example can be an ELASTISEARCH database.").
Claims 3, 11 and 19
With respect to claims 3, 11 and 19, the combination of Chong and Lowe discloses further comprising executable code, that upon execution after delivering the modified search results further causes the system to:
receive additional filtering input from the user via the graphical user interface, wherein the additional filtering input includes an instruction of "must include the fragment" in the search results, "additionally include the fragment" in the search results, or "exclude the fragment" from the search results (Lowe, [0045], "In some embodiments, the graphical user interface 40 further includes a region 50 with user selectable filters. In some embodiments, user selectable filters may further limit the Boolean query, for example, based on metadata of the documents. Examples include publication date ranges, geographic proximity to a reference location, topic categories, document source categories, or a country associated with the document.", Lowe, [0048], "The query that yields of the results shown in FIGS. 3 and 4 may be modified with steps shown in the process 10 of FIG. 1. As shown in FIG. 1, in some embodiments, before search results are presented, some embodiments may select narrowing terms that pertain to respective subsets of the responsive documents, as indicated by Block 16. Examples of narrowing terms are the items shown in region 44 and selectable through faceted inputs 42 in FIGS. 3 and 4. In some embodiments, the narrowing terms are topics, entities mentioned, keywords, or metadata attributes of the documents in the corpa (or other data set), and the like. The terms are narrowing because they only pertain to a subset of the documents and when selected are used to identify a subset of the documents.");
update the search results according to the additional filtering input (Lowe, [0053], "In some embodiments, the user may delete query elements as well during this process. Alternatively, upon determining that the user is done selecting query terms, embodiments may return to block 14 and research the corpus of documents to compose new search results and update the graphical user interfaces accordingly. In some embodiments, a user may iterate through the process 10 through multiple loops, refining their query until they reach their desired result."); and
deliver the updated search results to the graphical user interface (Lowe, [0065], "Having reached a satisfactory query with the interfaces of FIGS. 2-9, next, some embodiments of the process 10 in FIG. 1 may present search results and further query-adjustment interfaces with narrowing and broadening terms, as indicated in block 20. Examples of the presented interface are described with reference to FIGS. 3 and 4.").
Claims 4 and 12
With respect to claims 4 and 12, the combination of Chong and Lowe discloses after delivering the updated search results, the executable code, upon execution, further causes the system to perform the steps of claim 4/11 upon receipt of further additional filtering input from the user via the graphical user interface (Lowe, [0039], "To this end, some embodiments may present search results in graphical user interfaces like those illustrated in FIGS. 3 and 4, or in the force directed graph representations described below in some cases, presenting graphical user interfaces may be performed by sending instructions to a client device that cause the client device to prepare and render a display (e.g., a graphical, haptic, or audible stimulus).", Lowe, [0053], "Alternatively, upon determining that the user is done selecting query terms, embodiments may return to block 14 and research the corpus of documents to compose new search results and update the graphical user interfaces accordingly. In some embodiments, a user may iterate through the process 10 through multiple loops, refining their query until they reach their desired result.").
Claims 5, 13 and 20
With respect to claims 5, 13 and 20, the combination of Chong and Lowe discloses further comprising executable code, that upon execution, further causes the system to suppress a certain fragment from the search results upon receipt of an input to hide the certain fragment (Lowe, [0052], “Selection may be accomplished with a variety of techniques, including clicking, touching, hovering, and navigating through a selection menu. As illustrated, upon a user selecting a narrowing term … [i.e., corresponds to removing, which, using BRI, is a form of suppressing/hiding]”).
Claims 6 and 14
With respect to claims 6 and 14, the combination of Chong and Lowe discloses whereby the input to hide is instructed by a toggle button at the graphical user interface (Lowe, [0052], “Selection may be accomplished with a variety of techniques, including clicking [i.e., corresponds to “toggling”], touching, hovering, and navigating through a selection menu. As illustrated, upon a user selecting a narrowing term …”).
Claims 7 and 15
With respect to claims 7 and 15, the combination of Chong and Lowe discloses wherein the system further comprises a records repository storing the unstructured documents for search (Chong, [0026], “According to one embodiment, the news content data store 150 [i.e., corresponds to the “records repository”] is a repository that maintains and stores new documents from one or more news organizations, such as REUTERS. In one embodiment, the legal content data store 160 [i.e., corresponds to the “records repository”] is a repository of legal documents, such as WESTLAW that maintains court decisions, litigation dockets and filings, legal treatises, law review articles and annotations thereto. According to one embodiment, the supplemental content data store 170 is a representative repository of non-news and non-legal documents that are relevant to the search query are generally available on the accessible Internet.”, Chong, [0027], “In one embodiment, the data store 130 [i.e., corresponds to the “records repository”] is a repository that maintains and stores information utilized by the before-mentioned modules 122 through 126. In one embodiment, the data store 130 is a relational database.”, Chong, [0034], see ELASTISEARCH database, where elastisearch can search unstructured data.").
Claims 8 and 16
With respect to claims 8 and 16, the combination of Chong and Lowe discloses further comprising executable code, that upon execution, causes the system to update a natural language processing query algorithm based on input from the graphical user interface excluding or suppressing certain fragments from the search result (Chong, [0028], “The suggestion data store 132 maintains a defined grammar and linguistic and data constraints encoded in the grammar used to generate suggested query components. The results data store 136 serves to maintain all algorithms used to generate search result clusters [i.e., corresponds to the “natural language processing query algorithm”], as well as the search results clusters themselves.”, Lowe, [0052], “. The selection may be by the user among the presented candidate narrowing terms [i.e., corresponds to “excluding or suppressing certain fragments”] and broadening terms in the graphical user interfaces described with reference to FIGS. 3 and 4. Selection may be accomplished with a variety of techniques, including clicking, touching, hovering, and navigating through a selection menu.”).
Conclusion
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
– Aarskog, NO 316480 for textual examination and discovery; and
– Levett, WO 2020/161505 for improved text based searching.
Point of Contact
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to HUBERT G CHEUNG whose telephone number is (571) 270-1396. The examiner can normally be reached M-R 8:00A-5:00P EST; alt. F 8:00A-4:00P EST.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Apu Mofiz can be reached at (571) 272-4080. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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HUBERT G. CHEUNG
Assistant Examiner
Art Unit 2161
Examiner: Hubert Cheung
/Hubert Cheung/Assistant Examiner, Art Unit 2161Date: August 6, 2026
/APU M MOFIZ/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2161
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