Trainable sentence planning system

• US 7,729,918 B2
• Filed: 03/11/2002
• Issued: 06/01/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 03/14/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Nuance Communications, Inc. (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: AT&T Intellectual Property II LP (AT&T, Inc.)
• Inventors: Walker, Marilyn A., Rambow, Owen Christopher, Rogati, Monica
• Primary Examiner(s): Dorvil, Richemond
• Assistant Examiner(s): YEN, ERIC L
• Application Number:
  US10/258,776
• Publication Number:
  US 20030097249A1
• Time in Patent Office: 3,004 Days
• Field of Search: 704/9, 704270-275
• US Class Current: 704/275
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/3329 Natural language query formulation or dialogue systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/35 Discourse or dialogue representation
• CPC Class Codes: G10L 13/027 Concept to speech synthesisers; Generation of natural phrases from machine-based concepts generation of parameters for speech synthesis out of text G10L13/08

Abstract

The invention relates to a system that interacts with a user in an automated dialog system (100). The system may include a communicative goal generator (210) that generates communicative goals based on a first communication received from the user. The generated communicative goals (210) may be related to information needed to be obtained from the user. The system may further include a sentence planning unit (220) that automatically plans one or more sentences based on the communicative goals generated by the communicative goal generator (210). At least one of the planned sentences may be then output to the user (230).

Claims

1. A system that interacts with a user using an automated dialog system, comprising:

a communicative goal generator that generates communicative goals based on a first communication received from the user, the generated communicative goals being related to information needed to be obtained from the user;

a sentence plan generator that generates a plurality of sentence plans based on the generated communicative goals, each sentence plan of the plurality of sentence plans being a viable and potentially usable prompt in response to the user'"'"'s input; and

a sentence plan ranker that, independent of the user, ranks the plurality of sentence plans generated by the sentence plan generator, wherein at least one of the ranked planned sentences are output to the user.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the sentence plan ranker selects the highest ranked sentence plan to be output to the user.

3. The system of claim 1, further comprising:

a realization unit that applies a set of linguistic rules to the sentence plan selected by the sentence plan ranker.

4. The system of claim 1, further comprising:

a training database that includes a set of learned rules, wherein the sentence plan ranker ranks the plurality of sentence plans generated by the sentence plan generator using the set of learned rules.

5. The system of claim 1, further comprising:

a discourse history database that includes interaction information related to a set of interactions between the user and the automated dialog system, wherein the sentence plan generator generates a plurality of sentence plans using the interaction information.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein the user'"'"'s first communication includes nonverbal communications.

7. The system of claim 6, wherein the nonverbal communications include at least one of gestures, body movements, head movements, non-responses, text, keyboard entries, keypad entries, mouse clicks, DTMF codes, pointers, stylus, cable set-top box entries, graphical user interface entries, and touchscreen entries.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein the communicative goal generator generates communicative goals using recognition and understanding data from the user'"'"'s communication.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the communicative goal generator generates communicative goals that include confirming information previously obtained from the user.

10. The system of claim 1, further comprising:

a text-to-speech converter that converts at least one of the ranked sentence plans from text to speech.

11. The system of claim 1, wherein the system is used in one of a customer care system, a reservation system, parts ordering system, navigation system, information gathering system, and information retrieval system.

12. An automated sentence planning system that automatically plans sentences based on communicative goals input from an automated dialog system, the communicative goals being related to information needed to be obtained from a user, comprising:

a sentence plan generator that generates a plurality of sentence plans based on the communicative goals;

a sentence plan ranker that, independent of the user, ranks the sentence plans generated by the sentence plan generator and selects the highest ranked sentence plan, each sentence plan of the plurality of sentence plans being a viable and potentially usable prompt in response to the user'"'"'s input; and

a realization unit that realizes the selected sentence plan, wherein the realized sentence plan is output to the user.

13. The system of claim 12, wherein the realization unit applies a set of linguistic rules to the selected sentence plan.

14. The system of claim 12, further comprising:

a training database that includes a set of learned rules, wherein the sentence plan ranker ranks the plurality of generated sentence plans using the set of learned rules.

15. The system of claim 12, further comprising:

a discourse history database that includes interaction information related to a set of interactions between the user and the automated dialog system, wherein the sentence plan generator generates a plurality of sentence plans using the interaction information.

16. The system of claim 12, wherein the interactions between the user and the automated dialog system include nonverbal communications.

17. The system of claim 16, wherein the nonverbal communications include at least one of gestures, body movements, head movements, non-responses, text, keyboard entries, keypad entries, mouse clicks, DTMF codes, pointers, stylus, cable set-top box entries, graphical user interface entries, and touchscreen entries.

18. The system of claim 12, wherein the communicative goals are generated using recognition and understanding data from a communication received by the automated dialog system from the user.

19. The system of claim 12, wherein the communicative goals include confirming information previously obtained from the user.

20. The system of claim 12, further comprising:

a text-to-speech converter that converts the realized sentence plan from text to speech.

21. The system of claim 12, wherein the system is used in one of a customer care system, a reservation system, parts ordering system, navigation system, information gathering system, and information retrieval system.

22. An automated sentence planning system coupled to an automated dialog system that automatically plans sentences based on communicative goals related to information needed to be obtained from a user, comprising:

a sentence plan generator that generates a plurality of sentence plans based on the communicative goals and information related to a set of interactions between the user and the automated dialog system;

a sentence plan ranker that, independent of the user, ranks the sentence plans generated by the sentence plan generator using a set of learned rules and selects the highest ranked sentence plan, each sentence plan of the plurality of sentence plans being a viable and potentially usable prompt in response to the user'"'"'s input;

a realization unit that realizes the selected sentence plan by applying a set of linguistic rules; and

a text-to-speech converter that converts the realized sentence plan from text to speech, wherein the converted sentence plan is output to the user.

23. The system of claim 22, wherein the interactions between the user and the automated dialog system include nonverbal communications.

24. The system of claim 23, wherein the nonverbal communications include at least one of gestures, body movements, head movements, non-responses, text, keyboard entries, keypad entries, mouse clicks, DTMF codes, pointers, stylus, cable set-top box entries, graphical user interface entries, and touchscreen entries.

25. The system of claim 22, wherein the communicative goals are generated using recognition and understanding data from a communication received by the automated dialog system from the user.

26. The system of claim 22, wherein the communicative goals that include confirming information previously obtained from the user.

27. The system of claim 22, wherein the system is used in one of a customer care system, a reservation system, parts ordering system, navigation system, information gathering system, and information retrieval system.

28. A dialog system comprising:

a communicative goal generator that generates communicative goals including at least one implicit-confirm communicative goal;

a sentence plan generator that generates a plurality of sentence plans, wherein each sentence plan is a tree that represents how elementary lexico-structured representations are combined into larger lexico-structured representations, each elementary lexico-structural representation being associated with at least one communicative goal, each sentence plan of the plurality of sentence plans being a viable and potentially usable prompt in response to the user'"'"'s input;

a sentence plan ranker that, independent from the user, ranks the plurality of sentence plans; and

outputting a ranked sentence plan to the user.