Phrase-based dialogue modeling with particular application to creating recognition grammars for voice-controlled user interfaces

• US 9,251,138 B2
• Filed: 02/11/2014
• Issued: 02/02/2016
• Est. Priority Date: 05/28/1999
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: Nant Holdings IP, LLC (NantWorks, LLC)
• Original Assignee: Nant Holdings IP, LLC (NantWorks, LLC)
• Inventors: Ehsani, Farzad, Knodt, Eva M.
• Primary Examiner(s): Armstrong, Angela A
• Application Number:
  US14/178,259
• Publication Number:
  US 20140163968A1
• Time in Patent Office: 721 Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/211 Syntactic parsing, e.g. based on context-free grammar [CFG] or unification grammars
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/216 using statistical methods
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/247 Thesauruses; Synonyms
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/279 Recognition of textual entities
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/289 Phrasal analysis, e.g. finite state techniques or chunking
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/35 Discourse or dialogue representation
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/005 Language recognition
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/183 using context dependencies, e.g. language models
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/193 Formal grammars, e.g. finite state automata, context free grammars or word networks
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/197 Probabilistic grammars, e.g. word n-grams
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 15/22 Procedures used during a speech recognition process, e.g. man-machine dialogue

Abstract

The invention enables creation of grammar networks that can regulate, control, and define the content and scope of human-machine interaction in natural language voice user interfaces (NLVUI). More specifically, the invention concerns a phrase-based modeling of generic structures of verbal interaction and use of these models for the purpose of automating part of the design of such grammar networks.

Claims

1. A computer system for analyzing natural language comprising:

a phrase database configured to store phrases; and

a phrase analysis engine coupled with the phrase database and configured to;

obtain a corpus comprising a plurality of phrases;

extract phrases from the corpus;

determine a degree of similarity among the phrases based on phrase contexts associated with the phrases and on overlaps among phrase contexts determined by surrounding phrases in the corpus proximate to the phrases; and

cluster the phrases into classes within the phrase database based on the degree of similarity among the phrase; and

a user interface configured to present a response generated from phrases obtained from the phrase database to a user.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the corpus comprises a text corpus.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein the corpus comprises a speech corpus.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein the corpus comprises a conversational corpus.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein the corpus comprises a machine-readable corpus.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein the corpus comprises a specialized corpus that is specific to a domain.

7. The system of claim 6, wherein the domain comprises an interactive discourse.

8. The system of claim 7, wherein the interactive discourse comprises at least one of the following:

a task oriented interactive discourse, a verbal discourse, a simulated discourse, and a scripted discourse.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the classes comprises equivalence classes.

10. The system of claim 1, wherein the classes comprises tags denoting abstract conceptual representations.

11. The system of claim 10, wherein the classes comprises hand-checked tags.

12. The system of claim 10, wherein the tags includes at least one of the following:

a request, a confirmation, a rejection, a clarification, an object name, a location, and a proper name.

13. The system of claim 1, further comprising a dialog manager configured to generate the response based on a user-based natural language input from the user.

14. The system of claim 13, wherein the user-based natural language input is obtained via a phone.

15. The system of claim 13, wherein the user-based natural language input is obtained via a telephone hand set.

16. The system of claim 13, wherein the user-based natural language is obtained via a microphone.

17. The system of claim 1, where the phrases comprises normalized phrases.

18. The system of claim 1, where the corpus reflect interactions in multiple languages.

19. The system of claim 1, wherein the phrases relate to a genre.

20. The system of claim 1, wherein the phrases relate to food.

21. The system of claim 1, wherein the phrases relate to a request for help.