System for handling frequently asked questions in a natural language dialog service
First Claim
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1. A spoken language understanding module comprising:
- logic for performing spoken language understanding; and
logic for handling frequently asked questions, the logic for handling frequently asked questions performing the steps of;
classifying a user utterance;
selecting a question and answer table from a plurality of question and answer tables for the classified user utterance;
selecting a question from the selected question and answer table that is most similar to the user utterance using the following similarity computation;
wherein the term faqji represents the questions in the question and answer table and the term qi represents the user utterance; and
transmitting the selected question and associated answer to a dialog management module.
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Abstract
A voice-enabled help desk service is disclosed. The service comprises an automatic speech recognition module for recognizing speech from a user, a spoken language understanding module for understanding the output from the automatic speech recognition module, a dialog management module for generating a response to speech from the user, a natural voices text-to-speech synthesis module for synthesizing speech to generate the response to the user, and a frequently asked questions module. The frequently asked questions module handles frequently asked questions from the user by changing voices and providing predetermined prompts to answer the frequently asked question.
502 Citations
19 Claims
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1. A spoken language understanding module comprising:
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logic for performing spoken language understanding; and logic for handling frequently asked questions, the logic for handling frequently asked questions performing the steps of; classifying a user utterance; selecting a question and answer table from a plurality of question and answer tables for the classified user utterance; selecting a question from the selected question and answer table that is most similar to the user utterance using the following similarity computation; wherein the term faqji represents the questions in the question and answer table and the term qi represents the user utterance; and transmitting the selected question and associated answer to a dialog management module. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
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8. A method of handing user questions in a spoken dialog service, the method being associated with a spoken language understanding module in the spoken dialog service, the method comprising:
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receiving recognized text related to a user utterance; classifying the recognized text; selecting a question and answer table from a plurality of question and answer tables according to the classified text; and outputting a question and an answer selected from the question and answer table to a dialog management module, the outputted question selected using the following similarity computation; wherein the term faqji represents the questions in the question and answer table and the term qi represents the user utterance. - View Dependent Claims (9, 10, 11)
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12. A computer-readable medium storing instructions for controlling a computer device operating a spoken dialog service having a spoken language understanding module, the computer-readable medium instructing the spoken language understanding module to perform the steps of:
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receiving recognized text from an automatic speech recognition module; classifying the recognized text; selecting a question and answer table from a plurality of question and answer tables according to the classified text; selecting a question from the selected question and answer table according to the question'"'"'s similarity to the recognized text using the following similarity computation; wherein the term faqji represents the questions in the question and answer table and the term qi represents the user utterance; and wherein the term faqji represents the questions in the question and answer table and the term qi represents the user utterance; and outputting the selected question and a corresponding answer to a dialog management module. - View Dependent Claims (13, 14)
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15. A spoken dialog service comprising:
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logic that performs automatic speech recognition; logic that performs spoken language understanding; logic that performs dialog management; and logic that performs text-to-speech generation of synthesized speech, wherein the spoken language understanding logic further comprises; logic that handles frequently asked questions, the logic that handles frequently asked questions performing the steps of; classifying a user utterance; selecting a question and answer table from a plurality of question and answer tables for the classified user utterance according to the following similarity computation; wherein the term faqji represents the questions in the question and answer table and the term qi represents the user utterance; selecting a question from the selected question and answer table that is most similar to the user utterance; and transmitting the selected question and associated answer to the logic that performs dialog management.
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16. A method of selecting an answer from a question and answer table associated with a spoken language understanding module in a dialog system, wherein each question in the question and answer table is represented as a vector, and wherein there are “
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unique words in all the questions in the question and answer table, the method comprising;receiving a user question; calculating a vector representation of the user question; determining a set of words “
c”
in the user question that are not found in the “
m”
unique words;for each question in the question and answer table, calculating a similarity computation using the set of words “
c”
according to the following;wherein the term faqji represents the questions in the question and answer table and the term qi represents the user question; selecting a selected question in the question and answer table having the maximum value of the similarity computation; and selecting a corresponding answer from the question and answer table according to the selected question. - View Dependent Claims (17, 18, 19)
- m”
Specification