Sharing Intents to Provide Virtual Assistance in a Multi-Person Dialog
First Claim
1. A method for developing a semantic understanding of a natural language dialog session involving at least two human participants, the method comprising, with a computing system:
- receiving a plurality of instances of spoken natural language dialog input supplied by a plurality of human participants in the dialog session;
for each of the instances of dialog input, developing an intent, the intent comprising a structured representation of semantic content of the instance of dialog input;
storing the intents in a shared dialog context;
selecting an intent from the shared dialog context based on an intent mapping, the intent mapping defining a relationship between the selected intent and a current intent, the current intent comprising a structured representation of semantic content of a current instance of dialog input supplied by one of the human participants in the dialog session;
creating a shared intent by combining a portion of the selected intent with a portion of the current intent; and
executing an action on the computing system in response to the shared intent.
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Abstract
A computing system is operable as virtual personal assistant (VPA) to understand relationships between different instances of natural language dialog expressed by different people in a multi-person conversational dialog session. The VPA can develop a common resource, a shared intent, which represents the VPA'"'"'s semantic understanding of at least a portion of the multi-person dialog experience. The VPA can store and manipulate multiple shared intents, and can alternate between different shared intents as the multi-person conversation unfolds. With the shared intents, the computing system can generate useful action items and present the action items to one or more of the participants in the dialog session.
285 Citations
20 Claims
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1. A method for developing a semantic understanding of a natural language dialog session involving at least two human participants, the method comprising, with a computing system:
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receiving a plurality of instances of spoken natural language dialog input supplied by a plurality of human participants in the dialog session; for each of the instances of dialog input, developing an intent, the intent comprising a structured representation of semantic content of the instance of dialog input; storing the intents in a shared dialog context; selecting an intent from the shared dialog context based on an intent mapping, the intent mapping defining a relationship between the selected intent and a current intent, the current intent comprising a structured representation of semantic content of a current instance of dialog input supplied by one of the human participants in the dialog session; creating a shared intent by combining a portion of the selected intent with a portion of the current intent; and executing an action on the computing system in response to the shared intent. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
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11. A computing system operable as a virtual personal assistant (VPA), the VPA comprising processor-executable instructions embodied in one or more machine accessible storage media, the processor-executable instructions comprising:
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a speech recognition subsystem to receive a plurality of instances of spoken natural language dialog input supplied by a plurality of human participants in the dialog session; a semantic parsing subsystem to, for each of the instances of spoken natural language dialog input, extract semantic information from the instance of spoken natural language dialog input and develop an intent comprising a structured representation of the extracted semantic information; and a shared dialog understanding module to select one of the intents based on an intent mapping, the intent mapping defining a relationship between the selected intent and a current intent, the current intent comprising a structured representation of semantic information extracted from a current instance of dialog input supplied by one of the human participants in the dialog session, and create a shared intent by combining a portion of the selected intent with a portion of the current intent. - View Dependent Claims (12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)
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Specification