System and method for interactively guiding users through a procedure

A system for dynamically generating process trees and using the dynamically generated process trees to converse with a user, the system comprising:

• a device processor;
• and
• a non-transitory computer readable medium storing instructions that are executable by the device processor to implement:
• a process tree generator that generates process trees, wherein the process tree generator further comprises:
• a procedure classification model that classifies sections of text as procedural text or non-procedural text;
• a decision points identifier that identifies decision points in procedural text;
• a clause identification model that uses information about decision points in procedural text to identify independent and dependent clauses in the procedural text;
• a question generation model that generates questions corresponding to independent clauses identified by the clause identification model;
• an answer path analyzer that constructs paths between questions generated by the question generation model and dependent clauses identified by the clause identification model;
• a virtual agent that retrieves process trees generated by the process tree generator and uses the process trees to converse with users.

A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing software comprising instructions executable by one or more computers which, upon such execution, cause the one or more computers to:

• retrieve a document including text;
• automatically extract a section of text in the document corresponding to a procedure;
• automatically identify one or more decision points associated with the section of text;
• automatically identify a set of clauses associated with the one or more decision points, wherein each clause in the set of clauses comprise sequences of words from the section of text;
• automatically generate at least one question from the set of clauses;
• automatically generate a process tree from the at least one question and the set of clauses.