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System and method for disambiguating multiple intents in a natural language dialog system

  • US 9,009,046 B1
  • Filed: 09/27/2005
  • Issued: 04/14/2015
  • Est. Priority Date: 09/27/2005
  • Status: Active Grant
First Claim
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1. A method comprising:

  • receiving, via an interactive voice recognition system, a user utterance and converting the user utterance to text;

    generating multiple intents based on the text;

    establishing, via the interactive voice recognition system, a confidence score for each intent in the multiple intents, wherein the confidence score for each intent is based on how much training data corresponding to the each intent was used to train a spoken language understanding module, where more training data corresponds to a higher confidence;

    when only a single intent in the multiple intents has a confidence score above a threshold;

    identifying a plurality of call types associated with the multiple intents; and

    applying predefined precedence rules to respond to only a single call type in the plurality of call types, the single call type associated with the single intent; and

    when multiple intents have confidence scores above the threshold;

    identifying a first intent and a second intent based on the confidence scores for the multiple intents, wherein the first intent and the second intent have a highest two confidence scores in the multiple intents; and

    disambiguating the first intent and the second intent by presenting a disambiguation sub-dialog, via the interactive voice recognition system, wherein a user is offered a choice of which intent to process first, wherein the user is first presented with one of the first intent and the second intent having a lowest confidence score between the first intent and the second intent.

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