Appeal No. 1998-1386 Page 8
Application No. 08/269,156
With these principles in mind, we separately and distinctly
address the written description and enablement of the claims.
Written Description of the Claims
Regarding the written description of claims 1, 6-9, 12,
14, 15, 17, and 21, the examiner asserts, “Appellant does not
have adequate support in the disclosure for a second search
technique performed subsequent to a first search techniques
wherein both search techniques consider information pertaining
to both character shapes and literal context of the
characters.” (Supplemental Examiner’s Answer at 4.) The
appellant’s reply follows.
The First Search
As depicted in Fig. 7 and explained, for
example, on page 13, lines 23-28, the first search
considers character least-cost values for symbols
corresponding to the node (i.e., character) under
consideration. This is character shape information.
In the next steps of the search, the first search
considers, for example, trigram least-cost values
for the node. This is literal context information.
The Second Search
Inasmuch as the second search (the SBP search,
see Fig. 8) considers the path cost established by
the first search (see, for example, page 14, lines
24-28), it inherently considers character shape,
which made up part of the first search. The
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