Prior Art Comparator: Side-by-Side Claim-to-Citation Mapping for Patent Prosecution
The most time-consuming part of responding to a 103 rejection is finding where the examiner says each claim element is taught by the prior art. The Prior Art Comparator eliminates that search entirely.
The Manual Prior Art Mapping Problem
When an examiner issues a 103 rejection, the Office Action contains a claim chart mapping each claim element to one or more prior art references. The problem is that this mapping is buried in dense prose -- not organized in a way attorneys can quickly act on.
The typical workflow looks like this:
Parse the examiner's prose to identify which reference is cited for which claim element. Often requires re-reading multiple times.
Navigate to the specific pages, paragraphs, or figures the examiner cited. With 3-5 references, this is 15-50 minutes.
For each element of each claim, verify whether the cited passage actually teaches what the examiner says it teaches. This is where most arguments originate.
Find where the examiner's mapping is weak -- elements poorly mapped, passages that do not actually teach the limitation, combination motivations that are unsupported.
Total manual time: 55-140 minutes per rejection. For a single independent claim with 3 references. Multiply by the number of independent claims and rejection grounds.
How the Prior Art Comparator Works
The Prior Art Comparator extracts the examiner's claim-to-reference mapping from the Office Action text and presents it as a structured side-by-side view:
"a processor configured to receive a plurality of sensor inputs..."
"the controller 102 receives data from sensors 104a-104d through bus 106..."
Confidence: 87%"applying a machine learning model to generate a prediction..."
"neural network 210 processes the feature vector to produce output classification..."
Confidence: 62% -- Potential argument opportunityAutomatic Extraction
The AI parses the examiner's rejection text and identifies which specific passages from which references are cited for each claim element. No manual search required.
Side-by-Side View
Your claim language on the left, the examiner's cited passage on the right. Element by element. For every independent claim.
Confidence Scoring
Each mapping includes a confidence score. Low-confidence mappings indicate where the examiner's citation may not fully teach the claim element -- these are your argument opportunities.
Glass Box Verification
Every extracted passage is verified against the actual prior art document. If the AI cannot locate the exact passage, the mapping is flagged rather than fabricated.
Time Savings: Before and After
| Task | Manual | With Comparator | Saved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parse examiner's claim chart | 15-20 min | Automatic | 15-20 min |
| Locate cited passages in references | 15-50 min | Automatic | 15-50 min |
| Cross-reference to claim elements | 20-40 min | Automatic (side-by-side) | 20-40 min |
| Identify argument opportunities | 15-30 min | 5-10 min (confidence scores) | 10-20 min |
| Total | 65-140 min | 5-10 min | 55-130 min |
No Other Patent AI Tool Does This
Other patent AI tools provide rejection summaries, claim analysis, and amendment suggestions. None of them extract the examiner's specific citation passages and display them side-by-side with your claim language at the element level.
| Feature | Abigail | Others |
|---|---|---|
| Side-by-side claim vs. citation view | ||
| Element-level mapping | ||
| Exact passage extraction from references | ||
| Per-mapping confidence scores | ||
| Argument opportunity identification | ||
| Glass Box verification of citations |
See Your Prior Art Mapped Side-by-Side
Upload an Office Action with a 103 rejection and see the Prior Art Comparator extract and map every citation to every claim element.