Patent decision

BL number
O/210/07
Concerning rights in
GB0518043.5
Hearing Officer
Mrs S E Chalmers
Decision date
30 July 2007
Person(s) or Company(s) involved
insightful Corporation
Provisions discussed
PA 1977 Section 1(2)
Keywords
Excluded fields (refused)
Related Decisions
None

Summary

The application is concerned with computerized systems and methods for indexing and searching documents. The system is programmed to parse sentences to identify meaningful terms and their grammatical roles, to associate tags with those meaningful terms and to store representations of the tags. When a natural language query is received, the search engine parses the query and searches the indexed stored data set eg using latent semantic regression techniques, to locate data that contains similar terms used in similar grammatical roles and/or with similar entity tag types as indicated by the query. This syntactic approach is said to achieve more contextually accurate search results more frequently than using traditional search engines that work by generating results based on matching with words in the query. The hearing officer applied the four part test set out in the Aerotel and Macrossan judgment, found the invention to be excluded as a computer program, and refused the application.

Full decision O/210/07 PDF document50Kb