Appeal No. 2000-0810
Application 08/699,412
However, several problems undermine the validity of the examiner’s rejection of
appellants’ independent claims 1-14 and 16-20.
First, the examiner erroneously construed the scope and content of the
disclosure of Kucera. The following finding of the examiner (Answer at 8) is incorrect:
In this case, Kucera’s text analyzer utilizes a list of the most
frequently used word in the English language to determine
readability scores based on the tallying the number of
familiar words in a body of text (Kucera; col. 9, lines 43-45
and col. 14, lines 52-60). Since readability is “a measure of
the style difficulty of text” (Kucera; col. 1, lines 60-61), and
because “genre applies to different variations of the same
language involving different styles and manners of word use
within a natural language” according to Appellant’s
specification, Kucera is directed to mathematically
determining the genre of a document based on the
tallying [of] the number of familiar words in a body of text.
(Emphasis added.)
The above-quoted rationale is simply that (1) because Kucera discloses use of a
list of most frequently used words in the English language to determine a “readability”
score for a document, (2) because “readability” is a measure of the style difficulty of
text, and (3) because “genre” refers to different variations of the same language
involving different styles and manners of word use, Kucera discloses determining the
genre of a document based on tallying the number of familiar words in a body of text.
The problem, however, is that Kucera does not disclose the identification of any
recognized style or manner of word use. Kucera simply produces a “readability” score
based on well-known readability formulas. It does not categorize ranges of “readability”
scores into language styles or genres or identify any particular style or groups of styles
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