Speech processing dialog management

Abstract

A system for processing user utterances and/or text based queries that tracks entities and other context data of a current dialog between the system and the user and can fill slots for new intents of the dialog by performing statistical processing on previously mentioned entities with respect to current slots to be filled. The system may compare a previously mentioned entity to a current slot to be filled using vector representations, such as word embeddings, of the current utterance, dialog history, current intent, name of an entity under consideration, category of the current slot to be filled, distance between the current dialog turn and the dialog turn that mentioned the entity, and other considerations. The individual vectors may be weighted according to an attention operation and processed by a trained decoder to output a score indicating whether the entity in consideration is relevant to the particular slot. In this manner, slots may be filled using entities from previous dialog turns, thus performing statistical anaphora resolution and leading to improved system performance.