Ex Parte Watanabe et al

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Aug 28, 2014

10843748 (P.T.A.B. Aug. 28, 2014)

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.
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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.
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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
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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

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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.
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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.
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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
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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

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