Appeal No. 1999-1852
Application No. 08/701,242
retrieved” data item, retrieval is caused of the “linked data item specified by the identifier
appearing in the “already-retrieved” data item. The claims also call for automatic retrieval
of a plurality of “new data items” with each new data item being linked by a sequence of at
least one identifier to a user-selected data item or a data item linked thereto.
The examiner identifies column 8, lines 1-19, of Kupiec as providing for the claimed
“identifier.” It is true that at line 15 of that cited portion of Kupiec, the reference does recite
“document identifiers” retrieved from the text corpus. However, this refers to a document
identifier retrieved in response to subsystem 10 sending queries via channel 14 to
information retrieval subsystem 11. Once this document or document identifier is
retrieved, there are no further documents, or “data items” that are linked by an identifier
appearing in that “already-retrieved” data item, as required by the instant claims. Since we
find, in Kupiec, no teaching of an “identifier,” as required by the instant claims, Kupiec also
cannot show an automatic retrieval of a plurality of “new data items,” with each “new data
item” being linked by a sequence of at least one identifier to a user-selected data item or a
data item linked thereto, as also claimed.
The answer extraction subsystem of Kupiec generates and verifies answer
hypotheses by operating on a set of relevant documents but there does not appear to
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