RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF VIRTUAL PERSONAL ASSISTANT APPLICATIONS

• US 20140337266A1
• Filed: 05/10/2013
• Published: 11/13/2014
• Est. Priority Date: 05/10/2013
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: SRI International, Inc.
• Original Assignee: SRI International, Inc.
• Inventors: Kalns, Edgar T., Freitag, Dayne B., Mark, William S., Ayan, Necip Fazil, Wolverton, Michael J., Lee, Thomas J.
• Granted Patent: US 9,489,625 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 706/46
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 5/02 Knowledge representation; Symbolic representation

Abstract

A platform for developing a virtual personal assistant (“VPA”) application includes an ontology that defines a computerized structure for representing knowledge relating to one or more domains. A domain may refer to a category of information and/or activities in relation to which the VPA application may engage in a conversational natural language dialog with a computing device user. Re-usable VPA components may be linked to or included in the ontology. An ontology populating agent may at least partially automate the process of populating the ontology with domain-specific information. The re-usable VPA components may be linked with the domain-specific information through the ontology. A VPA application created with the platform may include domain-adapted re-usable VPA components that may be called upon by an executable VPA engine to determine a likely intended meaning of conversational natural language input of the user and/or initiate an appropriate system response to the input.

Claims

1. A method for populating an ontology with content for use in creating a virtual personal assistant (“

VPA”

) computer application for a domain of interest, the VPA application executable to determine a likely intended goal of a computing device user based on conversational natural language input of the computing device user, execute a task on behalf of the computing device user, and formulate a likely appropriate system response to the conversational natural language input, the method comprising, with a computing system;

obtaining the content in an automated fashion from one or more Internet web pages that support electronic interactions with computing device users relating to items in the domain of interest;

analyzing the content using the ontology, the ontology defining a computerized structure for representing knowledge relating to one or more domains, each domain referring to a category of information and/or activities in relation to which the VPA computer application may conduct a conversational natural language dialog with a computing device user;

determining a characteristic that the content has in common with at least a portion of the ontology; and

defining a data relationship between the content and the ontology based on the common characteristic.

2. The method of claim 1, comprising accessing a component of the VPA computer application that is linked with the ontology and using the accessed component to recognize the characteristic that the content has in common with the ontology.

3. The method of claim 1, comprising identifying a component of the VPA computer application that is linked with the ontology based on the data relationship between the content and the ontology, and using the identified VPA component to analyze the content.

4. The method of claim 1, comprising formulating the content in accordance with a requirement of a component of the VPA computer application that is linked with the ontology.

5. The method of claim 1, comprising obtaining the content from the one or more Internet web sites periodically in response to one or more triggering events.

6. The method of claim 1, comprising predicting the common characteristic and/or the data relationship using a computerized machine learning model.

7. The method of claim 1, comprising repeating the method for another domain of interest to configure the VPA computer application to operate over multiple domains of interest.

8. The method of claim 1, comprising obtaining the content from a plurality of different Internet web pages.

9. The method of claim 1, comprising presenting an interactive visualization of the ontology on a display of the computing system.

10. An ontology-populating agent embodied in one or more machine readable storage media and comprising a plurality of instructions that in response to being executed result in the computing system performing the method of claim 1.

11. A method for creating a virtual personal assistant (“

VPA”

) computer application for a domain of interest, the method comprising, with a computing system;

determining the domain of interest;

accessing a computerized ontology defining a structure for representing knowledge relating to a plurality of domains, each domain referring to a category of information and/or activities in relation to which the VPA computer application may conduct a conversational natural language dialog with a computing device user,

the ontology having linked thereto a plurality of re-usable VPA components, each of the re-usable VPA components being accessible by an executable VPA engine to determine a likely intended goal of the computing device user based on a determined meaning of conversational natural language input of the computing device user, execute a task on behalf of the computing device user, and/or generate a likely appropriate system output in response to the conversational natural language input;

determining a data relationship between the domain of interest and at least a portion of the ontology; and

suggesting a re-usable VPA component to use to create the VPA computer application for the domain of interest based on the data relationship between the domain of interest and the ontology.

12. The method of claim 11, wherein the ontology comprises a hierarchical structure of ontological concepts each representing a portion of the knowledge relating to the plurality of domains,

the re-usable VPA component is linked with one of the ontological concepts in the hierarchical structure,

the data relationship between the domain of interest and the ontology comprises a data relationship between the domain of interest and another of the ontological concepts in the hierarchical structure, and

the method comprises identifying the re-usable VPA component in an automated fashion based on an inheritance relationship between the one of the ontological concepts and the other of the ontological concepts in the hierarchical structure.

13. The method of claim 11, comprising creating a customized version of the suggested re-usable VPA component for the domain of interest.

14. The method of claim 13, comprising replacing a parameter of the suggested re-usable VPA component with content associated with the domain of interest.

15. The method of claim 13, comprising updating the ontology to include a link between the ontology and the customized version of the suggested re-usable VPA component.

16. The method of claim 11, comprising suggesting another re-usable VPA component to use to create the VPA computer application for the domain of interest based on the link between the re-usable VPA component and the ontology and a link between the ontology and the other re-usable VPA component.

17. The method of claim 11, wherein the suggested re-usable VPA component comprises a default task flow executable by the VPA computer application in response to the conversational natural language input, and the method comprises mapping data from an Internet web page that supports electronic transactions with computing device users relating to the domain of interest to the default task flow using the ontology.

18. The method of claim 11, wherein the suggested re-usable VPA component comprises a natural language dialog component usable by the VPA computer application to determine the likely intended meaning of the conversational natural language input, and the method comprises mapping data from an Internet web page that supports electronic transactions with computing device users relating to the domain of interest to the natural language dialog component through the ontology.

19. The method of claim 11, wherein the suggested re-usable VPA component comprises a natural language dialog component usable by the VPA computer application to generate the likely appropriate system output to the conversational natural language input, and the method comprises mapping data from an Internet web page that supports electronic transactions with computing device users relating to the domain of interest to the natural language dialog component using the ontology.