Systems and method for vocabulary management in a natural learning framework

A method of operating a natural language understanding (NLU) framework, comprising:

• receiving a user utterance;
• applying a prosody subsystem of the NLU framework to segment the user utterance into a plurality of phrases based on written prosody cues of the user utterance;
• for each phrase of the plurality of phrases:
• determining whether context is available for the phrase;
• in response to determining that context is available for the phrase, performing context-based disambiguation of the phrase and then attempting to determine a respective vector for the disambiguated phrase in a vocabulary model of the NLU framework;
• in response to determining that context is not available for the phrase, attempting to determining the respective vector for the phrase in the vocabulary model based on a surface form of the phrase;
• and
• in response to determining that the respective vector has not been located for the phrase, applying a null word rule to attempt to determine the respective vector for the phrase.

A non-transitory, computer-readable medium storing instructions of a natural language understanding (NLU) framework that are executable by one or more processors of a computing system, wherein the instructions comprise instructions to:

• receive a user utterance;
• apply a prosody subsystem of the NLU framework to segment the user utterance into a plurality of phrases based on written prosody cues of the user utterance;
• for each phrase of the plurality of phrases:
• determine whether context is available for the phrase;
• in response to determining that context is available for the phrase, perform context-based disambiguation of the phrase using a structure service and an ontology service of the NLU framework and then attempt to determine a respective vector for the disambiguated phrase in a vocabulary model of the NLU framework;
• in response to determining that context is not available for the phrase, attempt to determine the respective vector for the phrase in the vocabulary model based on a surface form of the phrase;
• and
• in response to determining that the respective vector has not been located for the phrase, apply a null word rule to attempt to determine the respective vector for the phrase.