Appeal No. 2004-0963
Application No. 09/384,088
considered a single character. For at least this additional
reason, Appellants respectfully submit that claim 1 is patentable
over Tateno in view of Halstead.
In accordance with the examiner’s position, it is noted that the
examiner views Tateno as not teaching any part of the evaluating step b
(as set forth in representative independent claim 1 on appeal argued in
the above-noted portions of the brief). From our study of the reference, it
clearly focuses only upon searching through a tagged document for the
location of any desired words rather than any specific characters
comprising words as is required such as in the comparison operation in the
evaluation step of representative claim 1 on appeal.
Correspondingly, even the title of Halstead “Identification of words in
Japanese text by a computer system” focuses only upon words and parts
of words, such as morphemes (including prefixes, stems and postfixes as
portions of words). Halstead does not exclusively deal with any individual
character comparisons. The initial states in the abstract of Halstead’s
patent emphasizes this as well as the discussion at column 3, lines 55-57
which indicates that the invention in Halstead is concerned with word
breaking for breaking a text string of Japanese into separate words and
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