Systems and methods for improving fulfillment of media content related requests via utterance-based human-machine interfaces

A natural language processing system, comprising:

• an automated speech recognizer configured to generate text transcriptions from an utterance;
• a natural language understanding subsystem configured to receive the text transcriptions and provide slot-intent models as output including a slot-intent model corresponding to each of at least two of the text transcriptions, wherein each slot-intent model includes an intent and one or more slots having key-value pairs;
• a fulfillment manager configured to receive the slot-intent models and start a service based thereon, wherein the fulfillment manager includes:
• a fulfillment strategy data store that stores fulfillment strategies, each fulfillment strategy describing rules for starting one of a plurality of services;
• a strategy selector that selects, for at least two of the slot-intent models, a selected fulfillment strategy from the fulfillment strategies based on a given slot-intent model, wherein the selected fulfillment strategies are each paired with a corresponding one of the slot-intent models to generate pairings;
• and
• an arbitrator configured to receive the pairings, choose a chosen pairing of the pairings, and initiate one of the services from the plurality of services associated with the chosen pairing, thereby resulting in an initiated service,
• wherein the arbitrator is configured to choose the chosen pairing by determining that a first affinity for a first media content item associated with the slot-intent model of the chosen pairing exceeds a second affinity for a second media content item associated with the slot-intent model of another of the pairings, the first affinity and the second affinity being determined from taste profile items within a taste profile of an account associated with the utterance, the taste profile being based, in part, on information about historical plays of media content, the taste profile items being associated with pre-stored identifiers corresponding to one or more services from the plurality of services,
• wherein the arbitrator is configured to choose the chosen pairing by, prior to the determining, eliminating at least one of the pairings based on at least one rule to provide a plurality of remaining pairings of the pairings;
• and
• wherein the determining is performed with respect to the remaining pairings only.