Ex Parte Somasundaran et al

Patent Trial and Appeal Board

Mar 14, 2018

13214291 (P.T.A.B. Mar. 14, 2018)

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.
13/214,291 08/22/2011 Swapna Somasundaran 2010P20118US01 1056
28524 7590 03/16/2018
SIEMENS CORPORATION
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY DEPARTMENT
3501 Quadrangle Blvd Ste 230
EXAMINER
RAAB, CHRISTOPHER J
Orlando, EL 32817 ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER
2156
NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE
03/16/2018 ELECTRONIC
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.
Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the
following e-mail address(es):
ipdadmin.us@siemens.com
PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07)
UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE
BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD
Ex parte SWAPNA SOMASUNDARAN, DINGCHENG LI,
and AMIT CHAKRABORTY
Appeal 2017-007453
Application 13/214,2911
Technology Center 2100
Before MAHSHID D. SAADAT, SCOTT B. HOWARD, and
JOHN D. HAMANN, Administrative Patent Judges.
HAMANN, Administrative Patent Judge.
DECISION ON APPEAL
Appellants file this appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the
Examiner’s final rejection of claims 22-31. We have jurisdiction under
35 U.S.C. § 6(b).
We reverse.
1 According to Appellants, the real party in interest is Siemens Corp. App.
Br. 1.
Appeal 2017-007453
Application 13/214,291
THE CLAIMED INVENTION
Appellants’ claimed invention relates to determining the relationship
between named entities by performing Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on
text associated with the named entities rather than on an entire document,
and the LDA for relationship mining can include context information or
supervised learning. Abstract. Claim 22 is illustrative of the subject matter
of the appeal and is reproduced below.
22. A method for mining a relationship of at least a first and
a second named entity comprising:
identifying a sentence with at least the first and the
second named entity in a document;
defining, by a processor, a first instance comprising the
first and the second named entity, a type of named entity for
each of the first and the second named entity, and text in the
sentence between the first and the second named entity;
applying, by a processor, latent Dirichlet allocation
(LDA) to the document, the LDA including an input of the first
instance, and then determining a distribution of types of
relationship as an output, the types of relationship comprising
labels of how the first named entity relates to the second named
entity; and
selecting one of the types of the relationship as the
relationship for the first and the second named entity.
REJECTIONS ON APPEAL
(1) The Examiner rejected claims 22-28 and 31 under 35 U.S.C.
§ 103 as being unpatentable over the combination of Brun (US
2010/0082331 Al; published Apr. 1, 2010) and Branavan (US
2010/0153318 Al; published June 17, 2010).
(2) The Examiner rejected claim 29 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as being
unpatentable over the combination of Brun, Branavan, and Henkin (US
2010/0138452 Al; published June 3, 2010).
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Appeal 2017-007453
Application 13/214,291
(3) The Examiner rejected claim 30 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as being
unpatentable over the combination of Brun, Branavan, and Dumais (US
2012/0041953 Al; published Feb. 16, 2012).
ISSUE
The dispositive issue for this appeal is whether the combination of
Brun and Branavan teaches or suggests “selecting one of the types of the
relationship as the relationship for the first and the second named entity.”
ANALYSIS
We find Appellants’ arguments discussed herein persuasive.
Appellants argue the combination fails to teach or suggest “selecting
one of the types of the relationship as the relationship for the first and the
second named entity,” as recited in independent claims 22 and 31. App. Br.
6-8. More specifically, Appellants argue that the Examiner incorrectly finds
Brun teaches or suggests this limitation. Id. Appellants argue Brun teaches
finding patterns and semantic relations between text elements, “but does not
provide any selection of a type of relationship of different entities.” App.
Br. 7 (emphasis added) (citing Brun ^ 23 (contending Brun teaches finding
lexico-syntactic patterns which include relationships between elements), 32
(contending Brun teaches finding examples of patterns in a text corpus), 97
(contending Brun teaches finding a syntatic parser)); Reply 3.
The Examiner finds that the combination, and Brun in particular,
teaches or suggests the disputed limitation. Ans. 3—4; Final Act. 4. More
specifically, the Examiner finds:
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Appeal 2017-007453
Application 13/214,291
Brim does teach that the distributions of the relationships is
determined. Brun also teaches that the type of relationship for
the named entities is determined or selected. For example,
sentences can be identified that contain instances of named
entities, and they can be processed to determine how the named
entities relate to each other (paragraphs [0066] - [0074]). This
allows for a particular relationship to be determined for the
named entities, which can then be stored for that instance of the
two named entities that is found. Therefore Brun teaches the
Appellant’s aforementioned claim limitation.
Ans. 3—4 (emphasis added).
We agree with Appellants that the portions of Brun that the Examiner
cites do not teach or suggest selecting one of the relationships as the
relationship for the entities. Brun ]fl[ 23, 32, 66-74, 97. Rather, these cited
portions are directed to determining types of relationships (i.e., determining
a distribution) between entities. Id. The Examiner’s finding that selecting
from among these relationships is taught or suggested because a distribution
of relationships is taught is not adequately supported in the record and lacks
the necessary rational underpinning. See In re Kahn, 441 F.3d 977, 988
(Fed. Cir. 2006) (“[R]ejections on obviousness grounds cannot be sustained
by mere conclusory statements; instead, there must be some articulated
reasoning with some rational underpinning to support the legal conclusion of
obviousness”), cited with approval mKSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S.
398,418 (2007).
Simply put, Bran’s teaching of having a relationship distribution does
not teach or suggest selecting one relationship for the entities from that
distribution. Although it may be possible (i.e., “[t]his allows for a particular
relationship to be determined for the named entities”) to select a
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Application 13/214,291
relationship, the Examiner fails to provide sufficient rationale to justify the
finding that selecting a relationship is taught or suggested by Brun.
Accordingly, we do not sustain the Examiner’s § 103 rejection of
independent claims 22 and 31, as well as claims 23-28 as they depend from
claim 22. We also do not sustain the Examiner’s § 103 rejections of claims
29 and 30, as they depend from claim 22.
DECISION
We reverse the Examiner’s decision rejecting claims 22-31.
REVERSED
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