Appeal No. 1999-1852
Application No. 08/701,242
instant invention in its object, appellant is reading the claim language much more narrowly
than a reasonable interpretation would require.
Our review of Kupiec and the instant disclosed invention reveals that the invention
disclosed by each is, indeed, very different, and for different purposes. Kupiec uses a two
step approach to improve upon the prior art whereby documents were retrieved strictly by
phrases literally found in a search query. Kupiec first uses a primary query construction to
retrieve documents likely to contain an answer to a user’s question. Then, Kupiec uses an
answer extraction process in order to generate answer hypotheses, which may be very
different than the original query, though relevant thereto, and then finds these hypotheses
within the same, original set of documents that were retrieved by the user’s query. Kupiec
makes no mention of the Internet. On the other hand, the instant disclosed invention is
concerned with linking to other documents on the Internet which might be of interest to a
user, linking those documents autonomously, without interruption of the user’s activities
and providing an observational, rather than a conversational, mode of assistance. The
autonomous browsing is guided by a user’s past behavior in reviewing documents.
Identification of preference criteria may be based on an item level, such as assessing the
importance of a document by noting the length of time, relative to the length of a document,
the user
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