Google Inc.

Patent Trials and Appeals Board

Mar 22, 2022

2022001672 (P.T.A.B. Mar. 22, 2022)

UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www.uspto.gov APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 15/394,875 12/30/2016 Jeffrey Dalton GGL-1215 7994 100462 7590 03/22/2022 Dority & Manning P.A. and Google LLC Post Office Box 1449 Greenville, SC 29602 EXAMINER VASQUEZ, MARKUS A ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2121 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 03/22/2022 ELECTRONIC Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the following e-mail address(es): usdocketing@dority-manning.com PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE ____________ BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD ____________ Ex parte JEFFREY DALTON, KARTHIK RAMAN, TOBIAS SCHNABEL, and EVGENIY GABRILOVICH ________________ Appeal 2022-001672 Application 15/394,875 Technology Center 2100 ____________ Before JENNIFER S. BISK, JOHN A. EVANS, and MATTHEW J. McNEILL, Administrative Patent Judges. McNEILL, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL Appellant1 appeals under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner’s final rejection of claims 1 and 3-20, which are all the claims pending in this application. Claim 2 was canceled. Appeal Br. 29 (Claims App’x). We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We affirm in part. 1 We use the word “Appellant” to refer to “applicant” as defined in 37 C.F.R. § 1.42 (2018). Appellant identifies the real party in interest as Google LLC. Appeal Br. 4. Appeal 2022-001672 Application 15/394,875 2 STATEMENT OF THE CASE Introduction The claimed subject matter relates to an information retrieval service that simultaneously and jointly selects both items and item attributes for display. Spec. ¶¶ 2-5. Claim 1 is illustrative of the claimed subject matter and reads as follows: 1. A computing system to select information for inclusion in informational displays, the computing system comprising: a machine-learned display selection model that has been trained to simultaneously and jointly select a plurality of items and one or more attributes for each item for inclusion in an informational display; one or more processors; and one or more non-transitory computer-readable media that collectively store instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the computing system to: obtain a plurality of candidate items that are candidates for inclusion in the informational display, wherein a plurality of candidate attributes are associated with each of the plurality of candidate items; determine a plurality of features for each of the plurality of candidate items or the candidate attributes for each candidate item; input at least a portion of the plurality of features, the plurality of candidate items, and the plurality of candidate attributes for each item into the machine- learned display selection model, wherein the machine- learned display selection model is operable to optimize a nested submodular objective function to simultaneously and jointly select the plurality of items and the one or more attributes for each item; and receive, as an output of the machine-learned display selection model, a single joint selection that Appeal 2022-001672 Application 15/394,875 3 specifies both the plurality of items and the one or more attributes for each item for inclusion in the informational display. Appeal Br. 29 (Claims App’x). The Examiner’s Rejections Claim 19 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 112(a) as failing to comply with the written description requirement. Non-Final Act. 3-4.2 Claims 1, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, and 18 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Pathak (US 2016/0283998 A1; Sept. 29, 2016) and Ahmed, Ahr et al., Fair and Balanced: Learning to Present News Stories, WSDM’12, February 8-12, 2012 (“Ahmed”). Non-Final Act. 5-13. Claims 3 and 4 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Pathak, Ahmed, and Hurley, Neil et al., Novelty and Diversity in Top-N Recommendation - Analysis and Evaluation, ACM Trans. Internet Technol., 10, 4, Article 14 (Mar. 2011) (“Hurley”). Non-Final Act. 13-14. Claim 5 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Pathak, Ahmed, and Stoyanov (US 2018/0144051 A1; May 24, 2018). Non- Final Act. 14-15. Claims 6, 12, and 19 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Pathak, Ahmed, and Waegeman, Willem et al., Learning layered ranking functions with structured support vector machines, Neural Networks 21, 1511-23, 2008 (“Waegeman”). Non-Final Act. 15-17. 2 All references to the Non-Final Action are to the Non-Final Action entered on January 6, 2021. Appeal 2022-001672 Application 15/394,875 4 Claim 8 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Pathak, Ahmed, and Lasko (US 8,856,099 B1; Oct. 7, 2014). Non-Final Act. 17. Claims 11 and 20 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Pathak, Ahmed, and Dolhansky, Brian et al., Deep Submodular Functions: Definitions & Learning, 30th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (2016) (“Dolhansky”). Non-Final Act. 18- 19. Claim 15 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Pathak, Ahmed, and Hermet-Chevanne (US 2018/0181375 A1; June 28, 2018). Non-Final Act. 19-20. Claim 16 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Pathak, Ahmed, Hermet-Chevanne, and Cao, Zhe et al., Learning to Rank: From Pairwise Approach to Listwise Approach, Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Machine Learning (2007) (“Cao”). Non-Final Act. 20-21. Claim 17 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Pathak, Ahmed, and Marantz (US 2015/0269176 A1; Sept. 24, 2015). Non- Final Act. 21-22. ANALYSIS Written Description Appellant does not argue the Examiner errs in rejecting claim 19 under 35 U.S.C. § 112(a) as failing to comply with the written description Appeal 2022-001672 Application 15/394,875 5 requirement. See Appeal Br. 7. Accordingly, we summarily affirm the written description rejection.3 Obviousness The Examiner finds Pathak and Ahmed teach or suggest “a machine- learned display selection model that has been trained to simultaneously and jointly select a plurality of items and one or more attributes for each item for inclusion in an informational display,” as recited in claim 1. Final Act. 5; Ans. 4-7. In particular, the Examiner finds Pathak teaches identifying a set of items corresponding to a particularly category, which the Examiner finds teaches selecting a plurality of items. Ans. 4 (citing Pathak ¶¶ 70-71). The Examiner finds this selection is a simultaneous and joint selection of items and item attributes because the resulting table includes both a plurality of items and a plurality of attributes. Id. (citing Pathak Fig. 6). Appellant argues Pathak does not teach a model that has been trained to “simultaneously and jointly select a plurality of items and one or more attributes for each item” because Pathak’s selection of items and their attributes occurs sequentially as two separate steps, not as a single, simultaneous and joint selection. See Appeal Br. 18-21. We agree. As found by the Examiner, Pathak teaches identifying a set of items corresponding to a particular category. See Ans. 4 (citing Pathak ¶¶ 70-71). We agree that this teaches selection of a plurality of items. However, Pathak teaches that 3 In the event of further prosecution of this application, the Examiner may wish to consider whether claims 1, 3-18, and 20 comply with the written description and enablement requirements. Although the Board is authorized to reject claims under 37 C.F.R. § 41.50(b), no inference should be drawn when the Board elects not to do so. See Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) § 1213.02. Appeal 2022-001672 Application 15/394,875 6 subsequent to this selection, a separate step is performed to “select[] a set 56 of item attributes 36 as a function of the determined product category 32.” Pathak ¶ 71. Thus, Pathak’s selection of item attributes is not performed simultaneously and jointly with its selection of items. The result is ultimately displayed to the user, with Figure 6 as an example of such a display, but the Examiner’s finding that Figure 6 demonstrates that the selection of items and attributes is done simultaneously and jointly is not supported by the teachings of the reference. For these reasons, we do not sustain the Examiner’s obviousness rejection of claim 1.4 We also do not sustain the Examiner’s obviousness rejection of independent claims 10 and 18, which recite commensurate subject matter. We also do not sustain the Examiner’s obviousness rejection of claims 7, 9, 13, and 14, which depend therefrom. Claims 3-6, 8, 11, 12, 15-17, 19, and 20 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103 as unpatentable over Pathak, Ahmed, and one or more of several additional references. Final Act. 13-22. The Examiner does not find that these additional references teach the disputed limitation. See id. Accordingly, we also do not sustain the Examiner’s obviousness rejections of claims 3-6, 8, 11, 12, 15-17, 19, and 20 for the same reasons discussed above with respect to claim 1. 4 Because we agree with at least one of the dispositive arguments advanced by Appellant with respect to these claims, we need not reach the merits of Appellant’s other arguments with respect to these claims. Appeal 2022-001672 Application 15/394,875 7 DECISION SUMMARY In summary: Claim(s) Rejected 35 U.S.C. § Reference(s)/Basis Affirmed Reversed 19 112 Written Description 19 1, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 18 103 Pathak, Ahmed 1, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 18 3, 4 103 Pathak, Ahmed, Hurley 3, 4 5 103 Pathak, Ahmed, Stoyanov 5 6, 12, 19 103 Pathak, Ahmed, Waegeman 6, 12, 19 8 103 Pathak, Ahmed, Lasko 8 11, 20 103 Pathak, Ahmed, Dolhansky 11, 20 15 103 Pathak, Ahmed, Hermet-Chevanne 15 16 103 Pathak, Ahmed, Hermet-Chevanne, Cao 16 17 103 Pathak, Ahmed, Marantz 17 Overall Outcome 19 1, 3-18, 20 TIME PERIOD FOR RESPONSE No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a). See 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(1)(iv). AFFIRMED IN PART