Nuance Communications, Inc.

William Jarrold

Adwait Ratnaparkhi

Benjamin Douglas

Deepak Ramachandran

Peter Frederick Patel-Schneider

Peter Zei-Chan Yeh

Peter Yeh

In some natural language understanding (NLU) applications, results may not be tailored to the user's query. In an embodiment of the present invention, a method includes tagging elements of automated speech recognition (ASR) data based on an ontology stored in a memory. The method further includes indexing tagged elements to an entity of the ontology. The method further includes generating a logical form of the ASR data based on the tagged elements and the indexed entities. The method further includes mapping the logical form to a query to a respective corresponding database stored in the memory. The method further includes issuing the query to the respective corresponding databases. The method further includes presenting results of the query to the user via a display or a voice response system.

System and method for natural language driven search and discovery in large data sources

Presenting natural-language-understanding (NLU) results can include redundancies and awkward sentence structures. In an embodiment of the present invention, a method includes, responsive to receiving a result to a NLU query, loading a matching template of a plurality of templates stored in a memory. Each template has mask fields associated with at least one property. The method compares the properties of the mask fields of each of the templates to properties of the query and properties of the result, and selects the matching template. The method further completes the matching template by inserting fields of the result into corresponding mask fields of the matching template. The method may further suppress certain mask fields of the matching template to increase brevity and improve the naturalness of the response when appropriate based on the results of the NLU query. The method further presents the completed matching template to a user via a display.

Aspects discussed herein present a solution for utilizing large-scale knowledge graphs for inference at scale and generating explanations for the conclusions. In some embodiments, aspects discussed herein learn inference paths from a knowledge graph and determine a confidence score for each inference path. Aspects discussed herein may apply the inference paths to the knowledge graph to improve database lookup, keyword searches, inferences, etc. Aspects discussed herein may generate a natural language explanation for each conclusion or result from one or more inference paths that led to that conclusion or result. Aspects discussed herein may present the best conclusions or results to the user based on selection strategies. The presented results or conclusions may include generated natural language explanations rather than links to documents with word occurrences highlighted.

Utilizing large-scale knowledge graphs to support inference at scale and explanation generation

A method is provided for representing and updating the state of a dialog involving a series of queries and commands to an artificial intelligence system. Each statement within the dialogue may be modeled as a relational tree spanning nodes corresponding to named entities within the statement. A data structure may be used to store each of these trees and to modify them as the dialog progresses. A subsequent statement in the dialog may be parsed and its contents used to update an ongoing search initiated within that dialog. Statements may be used for the update process despite being fragmentary or not corresponding to any predetermined grammar. An algorithm is disclosed for updating the trees within the data structure after a new statement is parsed.

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San Francisco, CA, United States of America

William Jarrold