Appeal 2007-1066
Application 10/170,510
Further, in view of Patamianos’ disclosure of context tracking using
AV pairs assembled and stored in tree data structures (§ 2.1), the use of
prototype trees and application trees (§§ 3 - 3.1), and adjustment of a
confidence associated with each candidate AV pair based on system intent (§
4.1), it is not clear how the reference might fail to anticipate the broad terms
of instant claim 1.1 Appellants’ Specification (¶ 23) cites the reference, but
is not helpful in providing information as to how the claims might be
thought to distinguish over the reference. The Specification, in fact, at
paragraph 23 appears to acknowledge the reference as describing an
embodiment of the presently claimed system, although the system as
claimed is not limited to a travel domain. On this record, it appears that two
instant co-inventors are co-authors of the § 102(b) reference. The instant
inventors should be in the best position to express how the claims might be
thought to distinguish over the system as described in the publication. Even
if Appellants “do not find” where the reference teaches or suggests that the
confidence score is adjusted (Reply Br. 3), we do. The score, which encodes
the confidence that an attribute has been given an unambiguous value and is
at least “associated with” each candidate AV pair, is dynamically updated at
each dialogue turn. Potamianos § 4.1, 1st ¶. Moreover, confidence scores
for each attribute-value pair are also adjusted at each dialogue turn. Id.
§ 4.1, 3rd ¶.
In any event, we are not persuaded that Patamianos fails to teach
adjusting a confidence based on system intent. To the extent that the
1 Potamianos reports at paragraph 5 that in the preliminary system no
confidence scores were implemented, which does not negate what the
reference teaches as a publication under § 102(b).
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Last modified: September 9, 2013