Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Nan Duan

Ming Zhou

Duyu Tang

Shujie Liu

Daxin Jiang

Linjun Shou

Yuanhua Lv

Wendi Wang

Ming Gong

In implementations of the subject matter described herein, a new approach for presenting a response to a message in a conversation is proposed. Generally speaking, in response to receiving a message in a conversation, the received message will be matched with one or more documents on the sentence basis. That is, the received message is compared with the sentences from a document(s), rather than predefined query-response pairs. In this way, a whole sentence may be selected from the document as a candidate response. Then the suitability of this sentence with respect to the ongoing conversation will be determined, and the response will be generated and rendered in an adaptive way based on the suitability. As a result, the user experiences may be significantly enhanced in the chatbot scenario.

Conversation oriented machine-user interaction

Implementations of the subject matter described herein provide a solution for generating a text from the structured data. In this solution, the structured data is converted into its representation, where the structured data comprises a plurality of cells, and the representation of the structured data comprises plurality of representations of the plurality of cells. A natural language sentence associated with the structured data may be determined based on the representation of the structured data, thereby implementing the function of converting the structured data into a text.

Generation of text from structured data

In embodiments of the present disclosure, there is provided an assertion-based question answering manner. After a question and the related passage are obtained, an assertion answer to the question is determined based on content of the passage, and the assertion answer has a predetermined structure and represents a complete semantic meaning. Then, the assertion answer to the question may be outputted to the user. In the embodiments of the present disclosure, the question and the relevant passage are used as input, and a semi-structured assertion answer is output. The assertion answer according to embodiments of the present disclosure can provide richer semantic content than the traditional short answer, and provide a more concise expression than the traditional long answer, thereby ensuring accuracy of the answer while improving the user experience.

Assertion-based question answering

Growing community of inventors

Redmond, WA, United States of America

Nan Duan