Ex Parte Watanabe et alDownload PDFPatent Trial and Appeal BoardAug 28, 201410843748 (P.T.A.B. Aug. 28, 2014) Copy Citation UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www.uspto.gov APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 10/843,748 05/12/2004 Hideo Watanabe JP920030044US1 8122 7590 08/28/2014 IBM CORPORATION Anne Vachon Dougherty, Esq. 3173 Cedar Road Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 EXAMINER ADESANYA, OLUJIMI A ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2658 MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE 08/28/2014 PAPER Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE ____________ BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD ____________ Ex parte HIDEO WATANABE and HIROSHI KANAYAMA ____________ Appeal 2012-001447 Application 10/843,748 Technology Center 2600 ____________ Before JOSEPH L. DIXON, JAMES R. HUGHES, and ERIC S. FRAHM, Administrative Patent Judges. FRAHM, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL Appellants appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner’s Final Rejections of claims 1, 3–9, 11, and 20–25. App. Br. 1.1 Claims 2, 10, 1 According to the Examiner: “As per Appellant’s statement regarding the status of the claims, Claims 14-15 have been cancelled.” Ans. 3. Appellants treat claims 14 and 15 as pending, stating: “[T]he combination of Moser and Gollins does not obviate . . . Claims 3-7, 11, 14-15, and 20-25.” Reply Br. 9. However, Appellants have not responded to the Examiner’s above statement of claims 14 and 15 being canceled. And, concordant with the Examiner’s statement, the claims appendix denotes claims 14 and 15 as canceled. App. Br. 36; see also Amendment filed Jan. 18, 2000 canceling claims 14 and 15. Appeal 2012-001447 Application 10/843,748 2 and 12–19 are canceled. Id. at 32, 35, and 36. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We reverse. PRIOR ART The Examiner relies upon the following prior art in rejecting the claims on appeal. Moser US 6,275,789 B1 Aug. 14, 2001 Kutsumi US 5,826,219 Oct. 20, 1998 Gollins et al., Improving Cross Language Retrieval with Triangulated Translation, 24th Annual Int’l ACM SIGIR Conf. on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (Sept. 2001), 1–6. REJECTIONS2 The Examiner rejected claims 1, 3–9, 11, and 20–24 under 35 U.S.C § 103(a) as unpatentable over Moser and Gollins. Ans. 6–14. The Examiner rejected claim 25 under § 103(a) as unpatentable over Moser, Gollins, and Kutsumi. Id. at 14–15.3 2 The Examiner objects to a Specification amendment. Ans. 5. Objections are petitionable to the Director; not appealable to the Board. See e.g., Ex Parte Frye, 94 USPQ2d 1072, 1077–78 (BPAI 2010) (precedential) (determining a new matter objection to a drawing amendment is not within the Board’s jurisdiction); see also MPEP §§ 706.01 and 1201 (8th ed., Aug. 2012). We therefore do not address the objection. 3 Appellants denote claim 25 as rejected over Moser and Gollins; not over Moser, Gollins, and Kutsumi. The prior office action, which prompted this appeal, confirms that claim 25 is rejected over Moser, Gollins, and Kutsumi. Final Rej. 16–17. Appeal 2012-001447 Application 10/843,748 3 DISCLOSED INVENTION The invention addresses ambiguities and resulting inaccuracies of machine translations. Spec. 1–4. As an example, the Japanese terms “ginko” and “teibo” respectively mean financial bank and waterway bank. Spec. 10. Both “ginko” and “teibo” accordingly translate from Japanese to English as “bank.” Id. On the other hand, “ginko” and “teibo” translate from Japanese to French as respectively “banque” and “dique.” Id. If a machine translation utilizes English as an intermediate language for translating the above terms from Japanese to French (i.e., from Japanese to English to French), then “teibo” may ambiguously translate to “bank” and in turn incorrectly translate to “banque” instead of “dique”. Id. To address such problems, the invention translates a source language to an annotated intermediate language and then to a target language. Id. at 13. The annotations include information that would be lost in direct translation. Id. ILLUSTRATIVE CLAIM Illustrative claim 1 is reproduced below. 1. A machine translation device comprising: a first translation engine for translating an original text written in a source language into a text in a natural intermediate language, and for acquiring and adding annotations obtained by the translation to the translated text in the intermediate language, said annotations comprising at least a source language annotation; and a second translation engine for translating the text in the intermediate language into a text in a target language by Appeal 2012-001447 Application 10/843,748 4 referencing the annotations added to the text in the intermediate language; and first and second bilingual dictionaries, wherein the second translation engine translates from the intermediate language to the target language using a first dictionary for the source language to the target language based on the source language annotation in addition to a second dictionary for translating from the intermediate language to the target language. ANALYSIS Claims 1, 8, and 9 are independent. The remaining claims on appeal depend from one of claims 1 and 9 and, accordingly, incorporate their respective limitations. Each of the claimed inventions recites translating a source language to an annotated intermediate language and then to a target language, where translating from the annotated intermediate language to the target language includes referencing a source-to-target dictionary based on the annotations. As reflected below, an issue on appeal is whether the Examiner has shown that Moser teaches or suggests the above combination of features.4 4 Claims 1 and 9 recite source, intermediate, and target languages. Claim 8 recites first, second, and third languages. Despite these differences, both Appellants and the Examiner treat claims 1, 8, and 9 as having comparable scopes. See e.g., App. Br. 28 (stating, as to claim 8, “Applicants rely on the arguments presented above [for claims 1 and 9] with respect to the teachings of Moser and Gollins.”); Ans. 26 (stating, as to claim 8, the Examiner “relies on the arguments presented above in regards to claims 1 and 9.”). In view of the foregoing, and because each of claims 1, 8, and 9 require the noted Appeal 2012-001447 Application 10/843,748 5 The Examiner presents three principal findings in addressing the combination. First, the Examiner finds that the annotations of claims 1, 8, and 9 are taught by Moser’s Table 8 tags. Ans. 7. A cited example is the “=z” tag of “bat=z,” where “z” denotes that “bat” corresponds is a zoological term. Moser, col. 20, l. 31 (cited at Ans. 7). Second, the Examiner finds that the intermediate language of claims 1, 8, and 9 is taught by Moser’s LAL. Moser describes the LAL as follows: A linked alternative language (LAL), is a specially designed language form that is quite different in outward format from its source language (SL) and which can be optimized a variety of ways, including making it much easier to learn for persons speaking a target language or languages, but which has also been carefully designed to retain full, bidirectional, machine translation (MT) equivalence to the source language. Moser, col. 4, l. 66–col. 5, l. 6. Third, the Examiner finds that the source-to-target dictionary of claims 1, 8, and 9 is taught by an English-Swahili dictionary linked to Moser’s Central Concordance. Ans. 23. Moser describes the Central Concordance and English-Swahili dictionary as follows: [A]s the LAL is devised, new strings for the LAL are filed alongside (collocated with) the SL strings to which they map. The Central Concordance thus becomes the “linking device” that links or maps the SL to the LAL. It also serves as the means for associating other subsidiary databases with the core. The SL side of the Concordance would record not only combination of features, we agree with Appellants and the Examiner that claims 1, 8, and 9 should stand or fall together. Appeal 2012-001447 Application 10/843,748 6 preexisting SL words (as found in standard dictionaries) but also those words coined for disambiguation, such as the tagged words in TABLE 8. Beyond its basic core of indexed sets of two collocated strings (in SL and LAL), the Central Concordance may also link to subsidiary databases, such as the following: . . . . e. a standard dictionary entry on the usages of the word or phrase in the source language; f. a standard bilingual-dictionary entry on the usages of the word or phrase in the source language and in any of a plurality of other natural languages or emulations thereof. For example, the entry on the English word “insect” as it appears in an English-Swahili dictionary; Moser, col. 31, l. 32–col. 32, l. 3 (emphasis added). In support of finding that the source-to-target dictionary of claims 1, 8, and 9 is taught by the above English-Swahili dictionary, the Examiner states only: Moser discloses a Central Concordance (col. 31, ln 25-28) containing a standard English-Swahili bilingual dictionary (i.e. a Source-Target bilingual dictionary). The concordance is based on a cross reference between source language and the LAL (fig 22A - 22B), therefore the English-Swahili dictionary disclosed is based on a LAL which in turn is annotated with the source language. Therefore the bilingual dictionary disclosed by Moser for translating from English to target Swahili is a first dictionary for the source language to the target language based on the source language annotation (LAL), and as such since the apparatus of Moser is capable of achieving the above limitation, it meets the claim, and as such the examiner maintains the rejection. Ans. 23. Appeal 2012-001447 Application 10/843,748 7 Appellants respond: The Examiner states that Moser . . . teaches a Central Concordance containing a standard English-Swahili bilingual dictionary. Appellants maintain, however, that Moser does not teach or suggest the use of bilingual dictionaries to translate from a source language to the LAL and thence to a third language. The Examiner’s statement that “the apparatus of Moser is capable of achieving the above limitation” is not a sufficient basis for a finding of unpatentability. Reply Br. 6. We agree with Appellants’ above argument insofar that the Examiner presents an insufficient basis for reading the annotations, intermediate language, and source-to-target dictionary of claims 1, 8, and 9 respectively on Moser’s tags, LAL, and English-Swahili dictionary. Under the above application of Moser, the Examiner must establish that Moser translates the LAL to a target language by referencing the English-Swahili dictionary based on the LAL tags. Otherwise, the Examiner fails to establish, as contended, that Moser teaches the claimed inventions’ translating of an annotated intermediate language to a target language by referencing a source-to-target dictionary based on the annotations. The Examiner has not presented any persuasive evidence that Moser translates the LAL to a target language by referencing the English-Swahili dictionary, much less by referencing the dictionary based on the tags. Rather, the Examiner cites to a description of Moser’s Central Concordance and then posits, apparently, that the included discussion of the tags and dictionary evidences they are cross-referenced to translate an English source language to a Swahili target language. See supra 7 (quoting Ans. 23). The Examiner also states that Moser’s system is accordingly “capable” of such Appeal 2012-001447 Application 10/843,748 8 translating. The above findings constitute mere speculation, not a reasonable inference, that Moser translates the LAL to Swahili via the English-Swahili dictionary. Note also that Moser’s cited discussions of the Central Concordance describe an “SL side” component for linking the source language and LAL; not for linking– much less translating— the LAL to a target language. Id. at col. 31, ll. 31–41. Given the above teaching and that the English-Swahili dictionary is a “standard bilingual-dictionary” (Moser, col. 31, l. 66–col. 32, l. 3) used to “ESTABLISH A ‘CENTRAL CONCORDANCE’” (id. at col. 31, l. 23), a reasonable inference is that the dictionary is used to develop the tags forming part of the Central Concordance. For example, the dictionary may be used to translate a Swahili source language to an English-based LAL, such as to translate between the Swahili word for a bat (i.e., mammal) and the tagged LAL term “bat=z.” DECISION For the foregoing reasons, the Examiner’s decision rejecting claims 1, 3–9, 11, and 20–25 is reversed. REVERSED kme Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation