ALEXANDRIA, Va., Nov. 11 -- United States Patent no. 12,468,896, issued on Nov. 11, was assigned to TENCENT AMERICA LLC (Palo Alto, Calif.).

"Method and apparatus for zero-shot natural language processing using visual imagination" was invented by Wenlin Yao (College Station, Texas), Hongming Zhang (Palo Alto, Calif.), Xiaoyang Wang (Palo Alto, Calif.), Dong Yu (Palo Alto, Calif.), Jianshu Chen (Palo Alto, Calif.) and Yue Yang (Shenzhen, China).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method performed by at least one processor includes receiving a first input stream of a task and a second input stream of a solution. The method further includes selecting the first input stream or the second input stream...