Patent application number | Description | Published |
20130304451 | BUILDING MULTI-LANGUAGE PROCESSES FROM EXISTING SINGLE-LANGUAGE PROCESSES - Processes capable of accepting linguistic input in one or more languages are generated by re-using existing linguistic components associated with a different anchor language, together with machine translation components that translate between the anchor language and the one or more languages. Linguistic input is directed to machine translation components that translate such input from its language into the anchor language. Those existing linguistic components are then utilized to initiate responsive processing and generate output. Optionally, the output is directed through the machine translation components. A language identifier can initially receive linguistic input and identify the language within which such linguistic input is provided to select an appropriate machine translation component. A hybrid process, comprising machine translation components and linguistic components associated with the anchor language, can also serve as an initiating construct from which a single language process is created over time. | 11-14-2013 |
20130346066 | Joint Decoding of Words and Tags for Conversational Understanding - Joint decoding of words and tags may be provided. Upon receiving an input from a user comprising a plurality of elements, the input may be decoded into a word lattice comprising a plurality of words. A tag may be assigned to each of the plurality of words and a most-likely sequence of word-tag pairs may be identified. The most-likely sequence of word-tag pairs may be evaluated to identify an action request from the user. | 12-26-2013 |
20140059030 | Translating Natural Language Utterances to Keyword Search Queries - Natural language query translation may be provided. A statistical model may be trained to detect domains according to a plurality of query click log data. Upon receiving a natural language query, the statistical model may be used to translate the natural language query into an action. The action may then be performed and at least one result associated with performing the action may be provided. | 02-27-2014 |
20140172899 | PROBABILITY-BASED STATE MODIFICATION FOR QUERY DIALOGUES - A device may facilitate a query dialog involving queries that successively modify a query state. However, fulfilling such queries in the context of possible query domains, query intents, and contextual meanings of query terms may be difficult. Presented herein are techniques for modifying a query state in view of a query by utilizing a set of query state modifications, each representing a modification of the query state possibly intended by the user while formulating the query (e.g., adding, substituting, or removing query terms; changing the query domain or query intent; and navigating within a hierarchy of saved query states). Upon receiving a query, an embodiment may calculate the probability of the query connoting each query state modification (e.g., using a Bayesian classifier), and parsing the query according to a query state modification having a high probability (e.g., mapping respective query terms to query slots within the current query intent). | 06-19-2014 |
20140180676 | NAMED ENTITY VARIATIONS FOR MULTIMODAL UNDERSTANDING SYSTEMS - Click logs are automatically mined to assist in discovering candidate variations for named entities. The named entities may be obtained from one or more sources and include an initial list of named entities. A search may be performed within one or more search engines to determine common phrases that are used to identify the named entity in addition to the named entity initially included in the named entity list. Click logs associated with results of past searches are automatically mined to discover what phrases determined from the searches are candidate variations for the named entity. The candidate variations are scored to assist in determining the variations to include within an understanding model. The variations may also be used when delivering responses and displayed output in the SLU system. For example, instead of using the listed named entity, a popular and/or shortened name may be used by the system. | 06-26-2014 |
20140222426 | System and Method of Providing an Automated Data-Collection in Spoken Dialog Systems - The invention relates to a system and method for gathering data for use in a spoken dialog system. An aspect of the invention is generally referred to as an automated hidden human that performs data collection automatically at the beginning of a conversation with a user in a spoken dialog system. The method comprises presenting an initial prompt to a user, recognizing a received user utterance using an automatic speech recognition engine and classifying the recognized user utterance using a spoken language understanding module. If the recognized user utterance is not understood or classifiable to a predetermined acceptance threshold, then the method re-prompts the user. If the recognized user utterance is not classifiable to a predetermined rejection threshold, then the method transfers the user to a human as this may imply a task-specific utterance. The received and classified user utterance is then used for training the spoken dialog system. | 08-07-2014 |
20140236570 | EXPLOITING THE SEMANTIC WEB FOR UNSUPERVISED SPOKEN LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING - An unsupervised training approach for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems uses the structure of content sources (e.g. semantic knowledge graphs, relational databases, . . . ) to automatically specify a semantic representation for SLU. The semantic representation is used when creating entity-relation patterns that are used to mine natural language (NL) examples (e.g. NL surface forms from the web and search query click logs). The structure of the content source (e.g. semantic graph) is enriched with the mined NL examples. The NL examples and patterns may be used to automatically train SLU systems in an unsupervised manner that covers the knowledge represented in the structured content. | 08-21-2014 |
20140236575 | EXPLOITING THE SEMANTIC WEB FOR UNSUPERVISED NATURAL LANGUAGE SEMANTIC PARSING - Structured web pages are accessed and parsed to obtain implicit annotation for natural language understanding tasks. Search queries that hit these structured web pages are automatically mined for information that is used to semantically annotate the queries. The automatically annotated queries may be used for automatically building statistical unsupervised slot filling models without using a semantic annotation guideline. For example, tags that are located on a structured web page that are associated with the search query may be used to annotate the query. The mined search queries may be filtered to create a set of queries that is in a form of a natural language query and/or remove queries that are difficult to parse. A natural language model may be trained using the resulting mined queries. Some queries may be set aside for testing and the model may be adapted using in-domain sentences that are not annotated. The models may be tested using these implicitly annotated natural-language-like queries in an unsupervised fashion. | 08-21-2014 |
20140278409 | PRESERVING PRIVACY IN NATURAL LANGAUGE DATABASES - An apparatus and a method for preserving privacy in natural language databases are provided. Natural language input may be received. At least one of sanitizing or anonymizing the natural language input may be performed to form a clean output. The clean output may be stored. | 09-18-2014 |
20140278424 | KERNEL DEEP CONVEX NETWORKS AND END-TO-END LEARNING - Data associated with spoken language may be obtained. An analysis of the obtained data may be initiated for understanding of the spoken language using a deep convex network that is integrated with a kernel trick. The resulting kernel deep convex network may also be constructed by stacking one shallow kernel network over another with concatenation of the output vector of the lower network with the input data vector. A probability associated with a slot that is associated with slot-filling may be determined, based on local, discriminative features that are extracted using the kernel deep convex network. | 09-18-2014 |
20140330565 | Apparatus and Method for Model Adaptation for Spoken Language Understanding - An apparatus and a method are provided for building a spoken language understanding model. Labeled data may be obtained for a target application. A new classification model may be formed for use with the target application by using the labeled data for adaptation of an existing classification model. In some implementations, the existing classification model may be used to determine the most informative examples to label. | 11-06-2014 |
20140343942 | Multitask Learning for Spoken Language Understanding - Systems for improving or generating a spoken language understanding system using a multitask learning method for intent or call-type classification. The multitask learning method aims at training tasks in parallel while using a shared representation. A computing device automatically re-uses the existing labeled data from various applications, which are similar but may have different call-types, intents or intent distributions to improve the performance. An automated intent mapping algorithm operates across applications. In one aspect, active learning is employed to selectively sample the data to be re-used. | 11-20-2014 |
20140350931 | LANGUAGE MODEL TRAINED USING PREDICTED QUERIES FROM STATISTICAL MACHINE TRANSLATION - A Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) model is trained using pairs of sentences that include content obtained from one or more content sources (e.g. feed(s)) with corresponding queries that have been used to access the content. A query click graph may be used to assist in determining candidate pairs for the SMT training data. All/portion of the candidate pairs may be used to train the SMT model. After training the SMT model using the SMT training data, the SMT model is applied to content to determine predicted queries that may be used to search for the content. The predicted queries are used to train a language model, such as a query language model. The query language model may be interpolated other language models, such as a background language model, as well as a feed language model trained using the content used in determining the predicted queries. | 11-27-2014 |
20150046159 | UNSUPERVISED AND ACTIVE LEARNING IN AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR CALL CLASSIFICATION - Utterance data that includes at least a small amount of manually transcribed data is provided. Automatic speech recognition is performed on ones of the utterance data not having a corresponding manual transcription to produce automatically transcribed utterances. A model is trained using all of the manually transcribed data and the automatically transcribed utterances. A predetermined number of utterances not having a corresponding manual transcription are intelligently selected and manually transcribed. Ones of the automatically transcribed data as well as ones having a corresponding manual transcription are labeled. In another aspect of the invention, audio data is mined from at least one source, and a language model is trained for call classification from the mined audio data to produce a language model. | 02-12-2015 |
20150052113 | Answer Determination for Natural Language Questioning - Open-domain question answering is the task of finding a concise answer to a natural language question using a large domain, such as the Internet. The use of a semantic role labeling approach to the extraction of the answers to an open domain factoid (Who/When/What/Where) natural language question that contains a predicate is described. Semantic role labeling identities predicates and semantic argument phrases in the natural language question and the candidate sentences. When searching for an answer to a natural language question, the missing argument in the question is matched using semantic parses of the candidate answers. Such a technique may improve the accuracy of a question answering system and may decrease the length of answers for enabling voice interface to a question answering system. | 02-19-2015 |