International Business Machines Corporation

Patent Trials and Appeals BoardDec 31, 2020

2020004847 (P.T.A.B. Dec. 31, 2020)

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. 15/271,338 09/21/2016 Corville O. Allen SVL920160108US1 1075 45725 7590 12/31/2020 Walder Intellectual Property Law PC 445 Crestover Circle Richardson, TX 75080 EXAMINER GLENNIE, DEBRA L ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 3689 MAIL DATE DELIVERY MODE 12/31/2020 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 CORVILLE O. ALLEN and TIMOTHY A. BISHOP ____________ Appeal 2020-004847 Application 15/271,3381 Technology Center 3600 ____________ Before, ANTON W. FETTING, JOSEPH A. FISCHETTI, and KENNETH G. SCHOPFER, Administrative Patent Judges. FISCHETTI, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL STATEMENT OF THE CASE Appellant seeks our review under 35 U.S.C. § 134 of the Examiner’s final rejection of claims 1–20. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). SUMMARY OF DECISION We REVERSE. 1 Appellant identifies International Business Machines Corporation as the real party in interest. Appeal Br. 2. Appeal 2020-004847 Application 15/271,338 2 Claim 1 reproduced below, is representative of the subject matter on appeal. 1. A method, in a data processing system comprising at least one processor and at least one memory, the at least one memory comprising instructions executed by the at least one processor to cause the at least one processor to implement a disambiguation engine for disambiguating content that implements the method, comprising: receiving, by the data processing system, electronic content from a corpus of electronic content; analyzing, by ingestion logic of the data processing system, the electronic content to identify an ambiguous portion of content, wherein the ambiguous portion of content is a portion of the electronic content whose meaning is not made explicit in the ambiguous portion of content; determining, by the disambiguation engine of the data processing system, a context associated with the ambiguous portion of content at least by analyzing a context portion of content, in the electronic content, associated with the ambiguous portion of content to identify at least one of header information, metadata information, or key term/phrase information associated with the context portion, and mapping the context portion of content to a predefined context having an associated set of one or more context based ambiguous content interpretation rules; applying, by the disambiguation engine, the set of one or more context based ambiguous content interpretation rules associated with the predetermined context to the ambiguous portion of content to generate an interpretation of the ambiguous portion of content, wherein each context based ambiguous content interpretation rule in the set of one or more context based ambiguous content interpretation rules maps a corresponding text pattern of ambiguous content with an interpretation of the ambiguous content for the predetermined context; annotating, by the disambiguation engine, the ambiguous portion of content based on the interpretation to generate disambiguated electronic content; and storing, by the data processing system, the disambiguated electronic content for processing as part of a subsequent operation. Appeal 2020-004847 Application 15/271,338 3 THE REJECTION The following rejections are before us for review. Claims 1, 2, 4–6, 8–12, and 18–20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Sandoval et al., U.S. 2009/0216563 A1, published August 27, 2009 in view of Koll et al., U.S. 2014/0047375 A1 published February 13, 2014. Claims 3 and 13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Sandoval, in view of Koll and in further view of Patel et al., U.S. 2014/0358586 A1 published December 4, 2014. Claims 7 and 17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Sandoval, in view of Koll and in further view of Morgan et al., U.S. 2006/0136270 A1 published June 22, 2006. ANALYSIS 35 U.S.C. (a) REJECTION Each of independent claims 1, 11, and 20, recite in one form or another, the steps of: determining, by the disambiguation engine of the data processing system, a context associated with the ambiguous portion of content at least by analyzing a context portion of content, in the electronic content, associated with the ambiguous portion of content to identify at least one of header information, metadata information, or key term/phrase information associated with the context portion, and mapping the context portion of content to a predefined context having an associated set of one or more context based ambiguous content interpretation rules. Appeal 2020-004847 Application 15/271,338 4 The Examiner cites to Sandoval to meet this limitation finding: (Sandoval discloses in par. 0045 where information regarding an entity includes that of roles and context Par. 0068 discloses where the disambiguation engine (120) receives context information about the entity entering preference information, and the contextual information is used to select the expert content store. Par. 0078 discloses where the analysis engine (125) accesses an entity's profile which is used in order to provide relevant information for the entity Context of the request. Par.0080 disclose where the analysis engine (25) selects 712 one or more content indices for analysis based on a context in which the analysis (125) is operating, Par. 0061 discloses where the indexing agent extracts the text 514 from the expert content and performs a variety of word normalization, dictionary lookup and common English term removal 516. The indexing engine then performs vector space word frequency decomposition. Par. 0062-0065 identify how often the term is used across all documents in the content store. The invention conducts a term frequency which identifies the number of times the term appears in the document divided by the number of unique terms in the document The Examiner asserts the prior art uses various measures and techniques to analyze the query terms (sets of rules) and the documents to a query as such the Examiner asserts the prior art is teaching that a query term is linked (mapped) to documents which contain the query term. Par. 0068 discloses where the disambiguation engine receives the contextual information which is used to select the expert content store.) (Final Act. 5). The Appellant argues, Appeal 2020-004847 Application 15/271,338 5 Paragraph [0045] of Sandoval teaches information that may be stored in an entity’s profile may include possessions, images, social connections, permissions, recommendation preferences, location, roles, and “context”. When one looks to see what Sandoval means by the word “context”, this is described in paragraph [0051] as being “an indication of activities or modes of operation of the entity, including what the entity is doing in the past, present, or future, such as shopping, searching, working, driving, or processes the entity is engaged in such as purchasing a vacation.” Thus, what paragraph [0045] is teaching is that the profile for the entity may include information about what the entity did in the past, present, future, or processes the entity was engaged in. This provides no teaching or even suggestion to specifically determining a context associated with the ambiguous portion of content…. (Appeal Br. 9). We agree with Appellant. Ambiguous content in Sandavol is disclosed as: “notations” (Specification ¶ 19); “ambiguous notations added to natural language content, such as notations added to electronic medical records by medical professionals.” Id. 17. “The meaning of these notations is ambiguous since it is not clear from the notation itself what these numerical strings represent.” Id. 18. Thus, we construe the meaning of “ambiguous content” as being a word or words not clear from the notation itself. Sandavol at paragraph 51 discloses that “context” of the entity may include such items as “what the entity is doing in the past, present, or future, such as shopping, searching, working, driving, or processes the entity is engaged in such as purchasing a vacation.” We do not find that such items Appeal 2020-004847 Application 15/271,338 6 constitute ambiguous content because the words are clear from the plain face of the words themselves and that these terms are attributes having defined meaning within the user profile (see also id. at ¶ 68). Thus, we find that the content stored in an entity’s electronic profile does not constitute ambiguous content. That is, Sandavol in paragraph 68 discloses the entity entering profile attributes, discussed in paragraph 51, directs which content store is selected. But, as we found above, the claim requires “determining, by the disambiguation engine of the data processing system, a context associated with the ambiguous portion of content.” As found above, the profile attributes in paragraph 68 do not constitute ambiguous content. Based on this analysis, it is not apparent, and the Examiner does not explain, how profile attributes constitute ambiguous content. Since claims 2, 4–6, 8–11, 14–16, 18, 19 depend from claims 1, and 11, since we cannot sustain the rejection of claims 1 and 11, the rejection of the dependent claims likewise cannot be sustained. The additional references of Koll and Patel as applied to claims 3 and 13, and Morgan as applied to claims 7 and 17 do not remedy the deficiency in Sandoval discussed above. 2 2 The panel did not enter a new ground under 35 U.S.C. § 101 in the first instance without the benefit of the Examiner’s analysis as to why there are no technological implementation details in the claims. Upon return of this application to the corps, the Examiner may wish to consider this point. Appeal 2020-004847 Application 15/271,338 7 CONCLUSIONS OF LAW We conclude the Examiner erred in rejecting claims 1–20 under 35 U.S.C. § 103. DECISION The decision of the Examiner to reject claims 1–20 is reversed. Claims Rejected 35 U.S.C. § Reference(s)/Basis Affirmed Reversed 1,2, 4–6, 8– 12, 14–16, 18–20 103 Sandoval, Koll 1, 2, 4–6, 8– 12, 14–16, 18–20 3 and 13 103 Sandoval, Koll, Patel 3 and 13 7 and 17 103 Sandoval, Koll, Morgan 7 and 17 Overall Outcome 1–20 REVERSED.