US 10,096,316 B2Granted

Sharing intents to provide virtual assistance in a multi-person dialog

AssigneeSRI International

InventorsEdgar T. Kalns, Douglas A. Bercow, James F. Carpenter

Life of this patent

Estimating the term…

Loading patent…

Abstract

A computing system is operable as virtual personal assistant (VPA) to understand relationships between different instances of natural language dialog expressed by different people in a multi-person conversational dialog session. The VPA can develop a common resource, a shared intent, which represents the VPA's semantic understanding of at least a portion of the multi-person dialog experience. The VPA can store and manipulate multiple shared intents, and can alternate between different shared intents as the multi-person conversation unfolds. With the shared intents, the computing system can generate useful action items and present the action items to one or more of the participants in the dialog session.

Claims19

Dependent claims

A non-transitory machine-accessible storage medium coupled with a processor of a computing system, the machine-accessible storage medium comprising computer code, the computer code comprising instructions that when executed by the processor cause the computing system to:

by a microphone, receive instances of conversational natural language input of a natural language dialog session involving a plurality of human participants;
determine semantic content of a first instance of the received instances of conversational natural language input, the first instance of conversational natural language input supplied by one of the human participants in the dialog session;
develop a first intent, the first intent comprising a structured representation of the semantic content of the first instance of conversational natural language input;
access a shared dialog context, the shared dialog context storing a plurality of intents developed from others of the received instances of conversational natural language input supplied by different human participants in the dialog session;
select a second intent from the shared dialog context, the second intent comprising a structured representation of semantic content of a second instance of conversational natural language input, the second instance of conversational natural language input supplied by another one of the human participants in the dialog session;
determine an intent mapping, the intent mapping defining a relationship between a portion of the first intent and a portion of the second intent;
create a shared intent by combining the portion of the first intent and the portion of the second intent based on the intent mapping;
instantiate the shared intent with data values extracted from at least the first and second instances of conversational natural language input;
in response to instantiation of the shared intent and using information extracted from the shared intent, generate and present, by an output device, an action item.

6 more elements

A computer-implemented method for developing a semantic understanding of a natural language dialog session involving at least two human participants, comprising executing on a processor the steps of:

by a microphone, receive instances of conversational natural language input of a natural language dialog session involving a plurality of human participants;
determining semantic content of a first instance of the received instances of natural language dialog input, the first instance supplied by a first human participant in the dialog session;
determining that the semantic content of the first instance of natural language dialog input comprises first incomplete information relating to a common intention of the plurality of human participants;
determining semantic content of a second instance of the received instances of natural language dialog input, the second instance supplied by a second human participant in the dialog session;
determining that the semantic content of the second instance of natural language dialog input comprises second incomplete information relating to the common intention of the plurality of human participants;
determining that the second incomplete information of the semantic content of the second instance of natural language dialog input relates to the first incomplete information of the semantic content of the first instance of natural language dialog input;
formulating a structured representation of the common intention to create a shared intent of the plurality of human participants, the structured representation comprising a portion of the semantic content of the first instance of natural language dialog input and a portion of the semantic content of the second instance of natural language dialog input;
instantiating the shared intent with data values extracted from at least the first and second instances of conversational natural language input;
in response to instantiation of the shared intent and using information extracted from the shared intent, executing an action item on a computing device of the computing system.

6 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.