Driving an interactive decision service from a forward-chaining rule engine

• US 9,251,466 B2
• Filed: 07/16/2014
• Issued: 02/02/2016
• Est. Priority Date: 11/16/2013
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Rajesh, Rao
• Primary Examiner(s): Holmes, Michael B
• Application Number:
  US14/332,417
• Publication Number:
  US 20150142703A1
• Time in Patent Office: 566 Days
• Field of Search: None
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 5/027 Frames
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/10 in which an application is distributed across nodes in the network software deployment G06F8/60; multiprogramming arrangements G06F9/46

Abstract

Disclosed techniques include generating a plurality of questions, each question based upon one or more conditions of a plurality of conditions, wherein the plurality of conditions are generated a plurality of business rules associated with a forward changing rule engine; identifying, as a side effect of evaluating the plurality of business rules for outcome data, missing information corresponding to the plurality of questions; and selecting, for presentation to a user, a first question of the plurality of questions to elicit the missing information from the user.

Claims

1. A method, comprising;

generating a plurality of questions for an interactive decision service, each question based upon one or more conditions of a plurality of conditions, wherein the plurality of conditions are associated with a plurality of business rules;

identifying, as a side effect of evaluating, by a forward changing rule engine, the plurality of business rules for missing information corresponding to the plurality of questions, wherein the missing information has not been previously requested from a user; and

selecting, for presentation to the user, a first question of the plurality of questions to elicit the missing information from the user.

2. The method. of claim 1, further comprising:

generating, for each question of the plurality of questions a corresponding reference count and ordinal ranking; and

identifying candidate questions from the plurality of questions;

based upon the corresponding reference counts and ordinal rankings;

wherein. the first question is selected from the candidate questions.

3. The method of claim 2, further comprising assigning to each question of the plurality of questions, a corresponding weight, wherein the candidate questions are, in addition to reference counts and ordinal rankings, also identified based upon the corresponding weights.

4. The method of claim 2, wherein each reference count corresponding to the plurality of questions is based upon a number of times the forward chaining rule engine references the corresponding question during pattern matching.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the forward chaining rule engine employs a Rete algorithm for evaluating the plurality of business rules.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the interactive decision service is associated with an interactive voice response system.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the interactive decision service is associated with a sell-service kiosk.