Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Semantic Machines, Inc.

Adam David Pauls

David Leo Wright Hall

Daniel Louis Klein

Jesse Daniel Eskes Rusak

Laurence Steven Gillick

Jordan Rian Cohen

Jacob Daniel Andreas

Pengyu Chen

Daniel Lawrence Roth

Jason Andrew Wolfe

Michael Jack Newman

Jayant Sivarama Krishnamurthy

David Ernesto Heekin Burkett

Andrew Volpe

Steven Andrew Wegmann

Taylor Darwin Berg-Kirkpatrick

Alexander J Kolmykov-Zotov

John P Bufe, Iii

Percy Shuo Liang

Joshua James Clausman

Alan Xinyu Guo

Yuchen Zhang

Benjamin David Van Durme

Emmanouil Antonios Platanios

Samuel McIntire Thomson

Jason Michael Eisner

Eui Chul Shin

Christopher H Lin

Subhro Roy

Linda Kathleen Arsenault

Benjamin Lev Snyder

Jordan R Cohen

A method of adapting a computerized assistant program to satisfy an updated constraint. The method comprises maintaining a dialogue history including a first utterance that indicates an initial constraint. The method further comprises receiving a second utterance indicating a new constraint that conflicts with the initial constraint. The method further comprises recognizing a revision function statement parametrized by a reference to an initial computerized assistant program configured to satisfy the initial constraint, and a reference to the new constraint. The method further comprises executing instructions derived from the revision function statement to return a revised computerized assistant program that is configured to satisfy the new constraint.

Updating constraints for computerized assistant actions

Systems and methods are provided for automatically generating a program based on a natural language utterance using semantic parsing. The semantic parsing includes translating a natural language utterance into instructions in a logical form for execution. The methods use a pre-trained natural language model and generate a canonical utterance as an intermediate form before generating the logical form. The natural language model may be an auto-regressive natural language model with a transformer to paraphrase a sequence of words or tokens in the natural language utterance. The methods generate a prompt including exemplar input/output pairs as a few-shot learning technique for the natural language model to predict words or tokens. The methods further use constrained decoding to determine a canonical utterance, iteratively selecting sequence of words as predicted by the model against rules for canonical utterances. The methods generate a program based on the canonical utterance for execution in an application.

Semantic parsing of utterance using contractive paraphrasing

A method comprising recognizing a user utterance including an ambiguity. The method further comprises using a previously-trained code-generation machine to produce, from the user utterance, a data-flow program including a search-history function. The search-history function is configured to select a highest-confidence disambiguating concept from one or more candidate concepts stored in a context-specific dialogue history.

Ambiguity resolution with dialogue search history

A method for configuring an automated dialogue system uses traces of interactions via a graphical user interface (GUI) for an application. Each trace includes interactions in the context of a plurality of presentations of the GUI. Elements of one or more presentations of the GUI are identified, and templates are associated with portions of the trace. Each template has one or more defined inputs and a defined output. For each template of the plurality of templates, the portions of the traces are processed to automatically configure the template by specifying a procedure for providing values of inputs to the template via the GUI and obtaining a value of an output. The automated dialogue system is configured with the configured templates, thereby avoiding manual configuration of the dialogue system.

Automatic spoken dialogue script discovery

A method, comprising recognizing a user utterance for processing. The method further comprises using a previously-trained code-generation machine to generate, from the user utterance, a data-flow program configured to produce a return value upon successful execution. The method further comprises beginning execution of the data-flow program. Responsive to reaching an error condition resulting from execution of the data-flow program, the method further comprises, prior to the data-flow program producing the return value, suspending execution of the data flow program. The method further comprises using the previously-trained code-generation machine to generate an error-handling data-flow program, wherein the error-handling data-flow program is configured to produce the return value; beginning execution of the error-handling data-flow program to produce the return value; and outputting the return value.

Error recovery for conversational systems

A data collection system is based on a general set of dialogue acts which are derived from a database schema. Crowd workers perform two types of tasks: (i) identification of sensical dialogue paths and (ii) performing context-dependent paraphrasing of these dialogue paths into real dialogues. The end output of the system is a set of training examples of real dialogues which have been annotated with their logical forms. This data can be used to train all three components of the dialogue system: (i) the semantic parser for understanding context-dependent utterances, (ii) the dialogue policy for generating new dialogue acts given the current state, and (iii) the generation system for both deciding what to say and how to render it in natural language.

Data collection for a new conversational dialogue system

A system that generates natural language content. The system generates and maintains a dialogue state representation having a process view, query view, and data view. The three-view dialogue state representation is continuously updated during discourse between an agent and a user, and rules can be automatically generated based on the discourse. Upon a content generation event, an object description can be generated based on the dialogue state representation. A string is then determined from the object description, using a hybrid approach of the automatically generated rules and other rules learned from annotation and other user input. The string is translated to text or speech and output by the agent. The present system also incorporates learning techniques, for example when ranking output and processing annotation templates.

Natural language content generator

A method for configuring an automated dialog system uses traces of interactions via a graphical user interface (GUI) for an application. Each trace includes interactions in the context of a plurality of presentations of the GUI. Elements of one or more presentations of the GUI are identified, and templates are associated with portions of the trace. Each template has one or more defined inputs and a defined output. For each template of the plurality of templates, the portions of the traces are processed to automatically configure the template by specifying a procedure for providing values of inputs to the template via the GUI and obtaining a value of an output. The automated dialog system is configured with the configured templates, thereby avoiding manual configuration of the dialog system.

An interaction assistant conducts multiple turn interaction dialogs with a user in which context is maintained between turns, and the system manages the dialog to achieve an inferred goal for the user. The system includes a linguistic interface to a user and a parser for processing linguistic events from the user. A dialog manager of the system is configured to receive alternative outputs from the parser, and selecting an action and causing the action to be performed based on the received alternative outputs. The system further includes a dialog state for an interaction with the user, and the alternative outputs represent alternative transitions from a current dialog state to a next dialog state. The system further includes a storage for a plurality of templates, and wherein each dialog state is defined in terms of an interrelationship of one or more instances of the templates.

Iteratively updating parameters for dialog states

Automated assistant for user interaction via speech

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Berkeley, CA, United States of America

Adam David Pauls