Nuance Communications, Inc.

Jerome Tremblay

Real Tremblay

Serge Robillard

Alina Andreevskaia

David Andrew Mauro

Jeffrey N Marcus

Tagyoung Chung

Amy E Ulug

Jean-Francois Fortier

Francois Berleur

Jackson Liscombe

Jean-Philippe Robichaud

Matthieu Hebert

Nicolae Duta

Stephen Douglas Peters

Ding Liu

Réal Tremblay

Christopher M Parisien

Maryse Boisvert

Amjad Almahairi

Lakshmish Kaushik

Aspects described herein provide quality assurance checks for improving the construction of natural language understanding grammars. An annotation module may obtain a set of annotations for a set of text samples based, at least in part, on an ontology and a grammar. A quality assurance module may automatically perform one or more quality assurance checks on the set of annotations, the ontology, the grammar, or combinations thereof. The quality assurance module may generate a list of flagged annotations during performance of a quality assurance check. The list of flagged annotations may be presented at an annotation review interface displayed at a display device. One of the flagged annotations may be selected and presented at an annotation interface displayed at the display device. Responsive to presentation of the flagged annotation, the ontology, the grammar, the flagged annotation selected, or combinations thereof may be updated based on user input received.

Automated quality assurance checks for improving the construction of natural language understanding systems

An arrangement and corresponding method are described for multi-domain natural language processing. Multiple parallel domain pipelines are used for processing a natural language input. Each domain pipeline represents a different specific subject domain of related concepts. Each domain pipeline includes a mention module that processes the natural language input using natural language understanding (NLU) to determine a corresponding list of mentions, and an interpretation generator that receives the list of mentions and produces a rank-ordered domain output set of sentence-level interpretation candidates. A global evidence ranker receives the domain output sets from the domain pipelines and produces an overall rank-ordered final output set of sentence-level interpretations.

Multi-domain natural language processing architecture

Inferring a natural language grammar is based on providing natural language understanding (NLU) data with concept annotations according to an application ontology characterizing a relationship structure between application-related concepts for a given NLU application. An application grammar is then inferred from the concept annotations and the application ontology.

Ontology and annotation driven grammar inference

A system and method for providing an easy-to-use interface for verifying semantic tags in a steering application in order to generate a natural language grammar. The method includes obtaining user responses to open-ended steering questions, automatically grouping the user responses into groups based on their semantic meaning, and automatically assigning preliminary semantic tags to each of the groups. The user interface enables the user to validate the content of the groups to ensure that all responses within a group have the same semantic meaning and to add or edit semantic tags associated with the groups. The system and method may be applied to interactive voice response (IVR) systems, as well as customer service systems that can communicate with a user via a text or written interface.

Call steering data tagging interface with automatic semantic clustering

In FAQ based systems, associating questions with answers can be a time consuming task if performed manually. In one embodiment, a method of building a frequently-asked questions (FAQ) portal can include creating cluster labels. The labels can include predefined universal semantic labels and application-specific labels. The method can further include applying the cluster labels to clusters of queries within an FAQ application. The method can additionally include adjusting the application-specific labels to support combined and newly created clusters of queries based on application-specific queries within the FAQ application on an ongoing basis and reapplying the universal semantic labels and the adjusted application-specific labels to the combined and newly created clusters of queries. The method and system proposed herein allow for the automated clustering of queries and association with applicable answers, which leads to higher efficiencies for a faster response time for a user.

Method and apparatus for a frequently-asked questions portal workflow

Techniques for grouping a plurality of samples automatically transcribed from a plurality of utterances. The method comprises forming clusters from the plurality of samples, wherein the clusters include two or more of the plurality of samples. One or more samples are selected from a cluster and manually-processed data samples for the one or more samples are obtained. A weighting factor may be assigned to the data samples based, at least in part, on the number of samples in the cluster associated with the selected data sample.

Sample clustering to reduce manual transcriptions in speech recognition system

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Montreal, Canada

Jerome Tremblay