Appeal No. 2004-0963
Application No. 09/384,088
appellants’ views set forth at pages 6 and 7 of these arguments, we
reproduce them here:
Appellants respectfully submit that the portions relied upon by
the Examiner in Halstead disclose postfix, stem, and prefix
morphology analysis on broken subsections of an inputted
Japanese text string. These postfix, stem and prefix are
various morphemes (i.e., morphological sections) of a word. As
one of ordinary skill in the art is aware, morphemes usually
represents a group of multiple characters taken together.
Thus, any analysis on each of these morphemes is on the
group of characters as a whole, rather than each individual
character within the group.
Moreover, Halstead discloses an analysis for a stem
morpheme by matching the whole stem morpheme against
words stored in a primary lexicon file, stored morpheme
patterns, and stored Kanji bi-gram (See col. 9, lines 35-50, col.
10, lines 12-19, and col. 12, lines 6-21 of Halstead). Therefore,
Halstead does not teach or suggest comparing each character
of the inputted search string to a plurality of predetermined
candidate character sets as set forth in claim 1. For at least the
foregoing reasons, Appellants respectfully submit that claim 1 is
patentable over Tateno in view of Halstead.
For the sake of argument, if the prefix morpheme is
considered by the Examiner as a single character, Halstead still
remains deficient in teaching or suggesting evaluating each of
the characters of the inputted search string to a plurality of pre-
determined candidate character sets, as set forth in claim 1,
because the prefix is not the only morpheme in the inputted
Japanese Text string disclosed by Halstead. In addition to
prefix, the inputted Japanese text string in Halstead includes
stem and postfix (See Fig. 2 of Halstead). A stem can not be
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