Acquiring new definitions of entities

A computing device configured to provide dialogue management and generate, from natural language input, a new definition for an ontology, the ontology comprising a tree-like data structure that organizes entities and identifies connections between the entities, the computing device comprising:

• a computer-readable medium storing non-transitory computer-executable program instructions;
• and
• a processing device communicatively coupled to the computer-readable medium for executing the non-transitory computer-executable program instructions, wherein executing the non-transitory computer-executable program instructions with the processing device causes the computing device to perform operations comprising:
• obtaining user input comprising a natural language expression;
• identifying a definiendum entity from the natural language expression and one or more defining predicates of the natural language expression based at least in part on a predefined logical form template, the predefined logical form template indicating common semantic patterns of definitions, the definiendum entity being a term that is being defined by a definition comprising the one or more defining predicates;
• converting the one or more defining predicates from text to a logical form representation;
• identifying through a generality control process, an optimized logical form representation for the logical form representation, the generality control process comprising 1) generating a plurality of logical form representations of the definition, each logical form representation comprising different predicate patterns, 2) executing each of the plurality of logical form representations as a respective query against a knowledge base, and 3) selecting the optimized logical form representation from the plurality of logical form representations based at least in part on a number of respective results each respective query generates;
• and
• generating, by the computing device, an updated ontology based at least in part on adding the optimized logical form representation of the definition to the ontology;
• and
• generating, by the computing device, an answer for a subsequent question expressed in natural language as part of a dialogue, the answer being generated based at least in part on the updated ontology.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing computer-executable program instructions for providing dialogue management and for generating, from natural language input, a new definition for an ontology, the ontology comprising a tree-like data structure that organizes entities and identifies connections between the entities, wherein when executed by a processing device, the program instructions cause the processing device to perform operations comprising:

• obtaining user input comprising a natural language expression;
• identifying a definiendum entity from the natural language expression and one or more defining predicates of the natural language expression based at least in part on a predefined logical form template, the predefined logical form template indicating common semantic patterns of definitions, the definiendum entity being a term that is being defined by a definition comprising the one or more defining predicates;
• converting the one or more defining predicates to a logical form representation;
• identifying through a generality control process, an optimized logical form representation for the logical form representation, the generality control process comprising generating a plurality of logical form representations of the definition, each logical form representation comprising different predicate patterns, executing each of the plurality of logical form representations as a respective query against a knowledge base;
• and selecting the optimized logical form representation from the plurality of logical form representations based at least in part on a number of respective results each respective query generates;
• generating an updated ontology based at least in part on adding the optimized logical form representation of the definition to the ontology;
• and
• generating an answer for a subsequent question expressed in natural language as part of a dialogue, the answer being generated based at least in part on the updated ontology.