Method, medium, and system for virtual agents to help customers and businesses

A virtual agent system, comprising:

• at least one processor;
• a memory communicatively coupled to the at least one processor and storing a semantic registry of a plurality of application programming interfaces, the semantic registry comprising, for each application programming interface of the plurality, (i) an identifier of the application programming interface, (ii) a set of parameters of the application programming interface, and (iii) one or more synonym annotations associated with each parameter of said set;
• wherein the memory further stores instructions that, when executed by the at least one processor, cause the at least one processor to:
• receive a natural-language input from a user,
• determine a desired action of the user and a context corresponding to the desired action from the natural-language input,
• select, from the semantic registry, one of the plurality of application programming interfaces by matching one or more tokens of the natural-language input against the synonym annotations,
• derive a set of parameter values for the selected one of the application programming interfaces from the desired action and the context, by (i) retrieving a plurality of past dialogs from a dialog history associated with the user, (ii) annotating one or more tokens of the past dialogs with labels using an entity name recognition technique, and (iii) executing one or more inference rules on the annotated past dialogs to derive at least one of the parameter values, and
• perform at least one of:
• (i) transmitting an invocation request configured to cause a client application to invoke the selected application programming interface using the derived set of parameter values, and (ii) invoking the selected one of the application programming interfaces with the derived set of parameter values.

A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing instructions that, when executed by at least one processor, cause the at least one processor to perform operations comprising:

• maintaining a semantic registry of a plurality of application programming interfaces, the semantic registry comprising, for each application programming interface, an identifier, a set of parameters, and one or more synonym annotations associated with each parameter;
• receiving a natural-language input from a user;
• determining a desired action of the user and a context corresponding to the desired action from the natural-language input;
• selecting one of the plurality of application programming interfaces by matching one or more tokens of the natural-language input against the synonym annotations;
• deriving a set of parameter values for the selected one of the application programming interfaces by retrieving a plurality of past dialogs from a dialog history of the user, annotating tokens of the past dialogs with labels using an entity name recognition technique, and executing one or more inference rules on the annotated past dialogs;
• and
• performing at least one of:
• (i) transmitting an invocation request configured to cause a client application to invoke the selected application programming interface using the derived set of parameter values, and (ii) invoking the selected application programming interface with the derived set of parameter values.