Cooperative build and content annotation for conversational design of virtual assistants

A computer program product comprising:

• one or more computer readable storage media and program instructions collectively stored on the one or more computer readable storage media, the stored program instructions comprising:
• program instructions to formulate a build context based on a build activity of a user;
• program instructions to formulate one or more content queries based on the build context;
• program instructions to build a content index for content and content-fragment texts by augmenting a text-search index with ability to handle conversational annotation schemes defined by a canonical representation according to a build environment of the build activity;
• program instructions to build a neural Information Retrieval (IR) index on conversational content annotations;
• program instructions to search the content index and the neural IR index in parallel using the one or more content queries to identify content relevant to the build context;
• program instructions to determine at least one recommendation for the user based on heuristic rules applied to the build context and the identified content, wherein each recommendation is a build suggestion or a content annotation suggestion.

A computer system comprising:

• one or more computer processors;
• one or more computer readable storage media;
• program instructions collectively stored on the one or more computer readable storage media for execution by at least one of the one or more computer processors, the stored program instructions comprising:
• program instructions to formulate a build context based on a build activity of a user;
• program instructions to formulate one or more content queries based on the build context;
• program instructions to build a content index for content and content-fragment texts by augmenting a text-search index with ability to handle conversational annotation schemes defined by a canonical representation according to a build environment of the build activity;
• program instructions to build a neural Information Retrieval (IR) index on conversational content annotations;
• program instructions to search the content index and the neural IR index in parallel using the one or more content queries to identify content relevant to the build context;
• program instructions to determine at least one recommendation for the user based on heuristic rules applied to the build context and the identified content, wherein each recommendation is a build suggestion or a content annotation suggestion.