Natural language query system for accessing an information system

• US 20040064323A1
• Filed: 08/05/2003
• Published: 04/01/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 02/28/2001
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Voice-Insight
• Original Assignee: Voice-Insight Belgian Corporation
• Inventors: Kemper, Charles, Den Ouden, Aart, Leger, Francois
• Application Number:
  US10/634,354
• Publication Number:
  US 20040064323A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/277
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/24522 Translation of natural language queries to structured queries
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/90332 Natural language query formulation or dialogue systems
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/193 Formal grammars, e.g. finite state automata, context free grammars or word networks
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 2015/228 of application context

Abstract

A spoken interaction system for enabling a user to interact with said information system, said interaction system being aimed at being connected to the information system, the interaction system being aimed at being connected to a recognition system for enabling the user to interact with the information system by means of phrases generated by said user and processed by the recognition system, said interaction system comprising at least one domain module aimed at having defined therein phrase set-ups that are constructed based on object classes, attributes classes and action classes that are common to said information systems of the considered application domain and are provided to the particularised with specific objects types, action types, attribute types and their instances, provided from the information system, in order to define a grammar of phrases that are provided to be generated by the user to interact with the information system.

Claims

1. An interaction system (5) for enabling a user (4) of an information system (1) belonging to an application domain of similar information systems to interact with said information system (1), said interaction system (5) being aimed at being connected to the information system (1), and to a recognition system (2) for enabling said user (4) to interact with said information system (1) by means of phrases generated by said user (4) and processed by said recognition system (2), characterised in that said interaction system (5) comprises at least one domain module (5a) aimed at having defined therein phrases set-ups that are constructed based on objects classes, attribute classes and action classes that are common to said information systems of the considered application domain and are provided to be particularized with specific object types, action types, attribute types and their instances, provided from said information system (1), in order to define a grammar of phrases that are provided to be generated by said user (4) to interact with said information system (1).

2. An interaction system (5) according to claim 1, characterised in that it comprises a generic module (5b) connected to said at least one domain module (5a) and aimed at being connected to said recognition system (2), said generic module (5b) being aimed at converting said phrases that can be generated by said user (4) into a textual computer representation usable by said recognition system (2) for the recognition of said phrases when generated by said user (4) and being aimed at converting a textual computer representation produced by said recognition system (2) after recognition of a phrase generated by said user (4) has happened into a phrase defined by said grammar.

3. An interaction system (5) according to claim 2, characterised in that said generic module (5b) comprises an element (c1) containing information enabling configuration of said recognition system (2).

4. An interaction system (5) according to one of the preceding claims, characterised in that it comprises an adapter module (5c) connected to said at least one domain module (5a) and aimed at being connected to said information system (1), said adapter module (5c) being aimed at extracting objects, attributes, action types and their instances from said information system (1) and pass them to said at least one domain module (5a) and being aimed at driving said information system (1) for the latter to execute a demand for action contained in a phrase generated by said user (4).

5. An interaction system (5) according to one of the preceding claims, characterised in that said at least one domain module (5a) comprises an element (c2) containing information about general notions of objects and attributes identifying objects that is common to several application domains.

6. An interaction system (5) according to any preceding claim, characterised in that said at least one domain module (5a) is aimed at being connected to a system analyst and linguist (3) aimed at defining object classes, attribute classes, action classes and phrases set-ups that said at least one domain module (5a) is aimed at having defined therein.

7. An interaction system (5) according to any preceding claim, characterised in that said recognition system (2) is a speech recognition system and in that the phrases generated by said user (4) are generated by pronunciation by said user (4).

8. An interaction system (5) according to one of the claims 1 to 6, characterised in that said recognition system (2) is a text recognition system and in that the phrases generated by said user (4) are written by said user (4).