Improved Techniques for Out-of-Domain (OOD) Detection

Abstract

The present disclosure relates to a technique for identifying out-of-domain utterances. One particular technique includes receiving an utterance and a target domain of a chatbot, generating sentence embeddings for the utterance, obtaining embeddings for each cluster of in-domain utterances associated with the target domain, predicting a first probability that the utterance belongs to the target domain based on similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings and each embedding for each cluster using a distance learning model, predicting a second probability that the utterance belongs to the target domain based on determined distances or density deviations between the sentence embeddings and embeddings for adjacent clusters using an outlier detection model, evaluating the first and second probabilities to determine a final probability, and classifying the utterance as in-domain or out-of-domain for the chatbot based on the final probability.

Description

[Technical field]

[0001] Priority claim This application is a continuation of and claims the benefit of and priority to U.S. Provisional Application No. 63 / 002,139, filed March 30, 2021. The entire contents of the above application are incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.

[0002] FIELD OF THEINVENTION The present disclosure relates generally to chatbot systems, and more particularly to improved techniques for identifying out-of-domain (OOD) utterances. [Background technology]

[0003] background Many users around the world are on instant messaging or chat platforms to get instant responses. Organizations often use these instant messaging or chat platforms to have live conversations with customers (or end users). However, it can be very costly for organizations to utilize service representatives to communicate live with customers or end users. Chatbots or bots have started to be developed to simulate conversations with end users, especially over the internet. End users can communicate with the bots through messaging apps that the end users already have installed and are using. Intelligent bots, generally enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), can improve the conversation experience by enabling a more natural conversation between the bot and the end user, as they are smarter and can converse live in a more contextual way. Instead of the end user learning a fixed set of keywords or commands that the bot knows how to respond to, an intelligent bot can understand the end user's intent based on the user's utterances in natural language and respond accordingly.

[0004] However, chatbots are difficult to build because these automated solutions require specialized knowledge in a particular domain and the application of specific techniques that may be entirely within the capabilities of an expert developer. As part of building such a chatbot, the developer may first understand the needs of the enterprise and the end users. The developer may then perform analysis and decisions related to, for example, selecting a dataset to be used for analysis, processing this input dataset in preparation for analysis (e.g., cleansing the data, extracting, formatting and / or transforming data prior to analysis, performing data feature engineering, etc.), identifying an appropriate machine learning (ML) technique or model to perform the analysis, and refining this technique or model to improve the results / outcomes based on feedback. The task of identifying an appropriate model may include developing multiple models, possibly in parallel, and iteratively testing and experimenting with these models before identifying the particular model (or models) to be used. Furthermore, supervised learning-based solutions generally include a training phase followed by an application (i.e., inference) phase, and an iterative loop between the training and application phases. The developer will be responsible for carefully executing and monitoring these phases to achieve an optimal solution. For example, to train an ML technique or model, accurate training data is required to enable the algorithm to understand and learn specific patterns or features (e.g., in a chatbot, intent extraction and careful syntactic parsing rather than just raw language processing) that the ML technique or model uses to predict a desired outcome (e.g., inferring intent from an utterance). Summary of the Invention [Means for solving the problem]

[0005] Quick Overview The technology disclosed herein generally relates to chatbots. More specifically, but not limited to, the technology disclosed herein relates to improved techniques for identifying OOD utterances. A chatbot (also referred to as a bot) includes an OOD detector that uses one or more algorithms to determine whether an utterance provided to the bot is not within the domain of the bot (e.g., a skill bot). When such an OOD utterance is detected, the bot can respond with an appropriate response, such as a message that allows the user to identify that the utterance is not something the bot can handle or address. In certain embodiments, techniques using various clustering-based and metric-based algorithms and combinations thereof are used for OOD detection.

[0006] In various embodiments, a method is provided, the method comprising the steps of receiving an utterance and a target domain of a chatbot; generating sentence embeddings for the utterance; and obtaining an embedding representation for each cluster of a plurality of clusters of in-domain utterances associated with the target domain, the embedding representation for each cluster being an average of sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance in the cluster; the method further comprises inputting the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedding representations for each cluster into a metric learning model, the metric learning model having trained model parameters configured to provide a first probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain or not; the method further comprises the steps of using the metric learning model to determine similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster; and using the metric learning model to determine similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster. inputting the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedding representations for each cluster into an outlier detection model, the outlier detection model being constructed with a distance or density algorithm for outlier detection, the method further comprising: using the outlier detection model to determine a distance or density deviation between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedding representations for adjacent clusters; using the outlier detection model to predict the second probability of the utterance belonging to the target domain or not based on the determined distance or density deviation; evaluating the first probability and the second probability to determine a final probability of the utterance belonging to the target domain or not; and classifying the utterance as being in-domain or out-domain for the chatbot based on the final probability.

[0007] In some embodiments, obtaining the embedded representation for each cluster comprises obtaining an in-domain utterance based on the target domain; generating a sentence embedding for each in-domain utterance; and inputting the sentence embedding for each in-domain utterance into an unsupervised clustering model, the unsupervised clustering model configured to interpret the in-domain utterance to identify the plurality of clusters in the feature space of the in-domain utterance; obtaining the embedded representation for each cluster further comprises classifying the sentence embedding for each in-domain utterance into one of the plurality of clusters using the unsupervised clustering model based on similarities and differences between features of the sentence embedding and features of the sentence embedding in each cluster; calculating a centroid for each cluster of the plurality of clusters; and outputting the embedded representation and the centroid for each cluster of the plurality of clusters.

[0008] In some embodiments, the method further comprises calculating a z-score for the utterance based on the distance or density deviation between the sentence embedding for the utterance and the embedding representations for the neighboring clusters, and determining the second probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain by applying a sigmoid function to the z-score.

[0009] In some embodiments, the sentence embedding for the utterance is generated using an embedding model that maps natural language elements, including sentences, words and n-grams, to sequences of numbers, with each of the natural language elements represented as a single point in a vector space.

[0010] In some embodiments, determining the similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster comprises: (i) calculating an absolute difference between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster; and (ii) inputting the absolute difference, the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedded representations for each cluster into a Wide-and-Deep Learning Network, wherein the Wide-and-Deep Learning Network comprises a linear model and a deep neural network; and determining the similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster further comprises: (iii) predicting a wide-based probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain using the linear model and the absolute difference; and (iv) determining the similarity or difference between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster using the deep neural network, the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedded representations for each cluster, wherein predicting the first probability comprises evaluating the wide probability and the similarity or difference between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster using a final layer of the wide-and-deep learning network.

[0011] In some embodiments, the linear model comprises a plurality of model parameters trained using a set of training data, the set of training data including absolute differences between sentence embeddings for an utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster for in-domain utterances from a plurality of domains, and during training of the linear model with the set of training data, a hypothesis function is used to learn a linear relationship between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster, and during learning of the linear relationship, the plurality of model parameters are trained to minimize a loss function.

[0012] In some embodiments, the deep learning network comprises a plurality of model parameters trained using a set of training data, the set of training data including sentence embeddings for in-domain utterances from a plurality of domains, and during training of the deep learning network with the set of training data, high dimensional features of the sentence embeddings for the in-domain utterances are converted to low dimensional vectors, which are then concatenated with features from the in-domain utterances and fed to a hidden layer of the deep neural network, and values ​​of the low dimensional vectors are randomly initialized and, together with the plurality of model parameters, trained to minimize a loss function.

[0013] In various embodiments, a computer program product is provided, the computer program product being tangibly embodied in a non-transitory machine-readable storage medium and including instructions configured to cause one or more data processors to perform some or all of one or more of the methods disclosed herein.

[0014] In various embodiments, a system is provided that includes one or more data processors and a non-transitory computer readable storage medium that includes instructions that, when executed on the one or more data processors, cause the one or more data processors to perform some or all of one or more methods disclosed herein.

[0015] The techniques described above and below can be implemented in a variety of forms and in a variety of contexts. Some example implementations and contexts are provided with reference to the following drawings, as described in more detail below. However, the following implementations and contexts are only a few among many. [Brief description of the drawings]

[0016] [Figure 1]FIG. 1 is a simplified block diagram of a distributed environment incorporating an illustrative embodiment. [Diagram 2] FIG. 2 is a simplified block diagram of a computing system implementing a Masterbot, according to certain embodiments. [Diagram 3] FIG. 1 is a simplified block diagram of a computing system implementing a skillbot, according to certain embodiments. [Figure 4] FIG. 1 is a simplified block diagram of a chatbot training and deployment system according to various embodiments. [Diagram 5] FIG. 1 illustrates an ensemble architecture comprising a metric learning model and an outlier detection model for identifying OOD utterances, according to various embodiments. [Figure 6] FIG. 1 illustrates a process flow for identifying an OOD utterance, according to various embodiments. [Figure 7] 1 is a simplified diagram of a distributed system for implementing various embodiments. [Figure 8] FIG. 1 is a simplified block diagram of one or more components of a system environment in which services provided by one or more components of an embodiment system may be provided as cloud services, according to various embodiments. [Figure 9] FIG. 1 illustrates an example computer system that can be used to implement various embodiments. DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

[0017] Detailed Description In the following description, for purposes of explanation, specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of particular embodiments. However, it will be apparent that various embodiments may be practiced without these specific details. The drawings and description are not intended to be limiting. The word "exemplary" is used herein to mean "serving as an example, instance, or illustration." Any embodiment or design described herein as "exemplary" is not necessarily to be construed as preferred or advantageous over other embodiments or designs.

[0018] Introduction A digital assistant is an artificial intelligence-driven interface that helps users accomplish various tasks in natural language conversation. For each digital assistant, customers can bring together one or more skills. Skills (also described herein as chatbots, bots, or skillbots) are individual bots that specialize in a particular type of task, such as tracking inventory, submitting time cards, and creating expense reports. When an end user engages with a digital assistant, the digital assistant evaluates the end user input to route the conversation to and from the appropriate chatbot. Digital assistants can be made available to end users through various channels, such as Facebook® Messenger, Skype Mobile® Messenger, or Short Message Service (SMS). The channels allow chats to and from the end user on various messaging platforms and the digital assistant and its various chatbots. These channels can also support user-agent escalation, event-triggered conversations, and testing.

[0019] Intents allow a chatbot to understand what a user wants the chatbot to do. Intents consist of a reordering of typical user requests and utterances, also referred to as utterances (e.g., get account balance, make a purchase, etc.). As used herein, an utterance or message is a set of words (e.g., one or more sentences) exchanged during a conversation with a chatbot. An intent can be created by providing a name that indicates some user action (e.g., order a pizza) and compiling a set of real-world user utterances or utterances that are typically associated with triggering that action. Since the chatbot's cognition is derived from these intents, each intent can be created from a robust (1-2 dozen utterances) and diverse dataset to enable the chatbot to interpret ambiguous user input. A rich set of utterances allows the chatbot to understand what the user wants to do when it receives messages like "Forget this order!" or "Cancel the delivery!", i.e., messages that mean the same thing but are expressed differently. The intents and their associated utterances collectively constitute the training corpus for the chatbot. By training a model with this corpus, customers essentially turn the model into a reference tool for decomposing end user input into a single intent. Customers can improve the chatbot's cognition through multiple rounds of intent testing and intent training.

[0020] However, building a chatbot that can determine an end user's intent based on a user utterance is a challenging task, due in part to the subtleties and ambiguities of natural language, the dimensions of the input space (e.g., possible user utterances), and the size of the output space (number of intents). Illustrative examples of this difficulty arise from features of natural language such as utilizing euphemisms, synonyms, or ungrammatical speech to express intent. For example, an utterance may express an intent to order a pizza without explicitly mentioning pizza, ordering, or delivery. For example, in the local language of a particular region, "pizza" is referred to as "pie." These natural language tendencies, such as imprecision or variability, will introduce uncertainty and, for example, the inclusion of keywords will introduce reliability as a parameter for the prediction of intent unlike an explicit indication of intent. Thus, chatbots may need to be trained, monitored, debugged, and retrained to improve their performance and the user experience with them. In conventional systems, training systems are provided for training and retraining machine learning models of digital assistants or chatbots in Speech Language Understanding (SLU) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Traditionally, models used in chatbot systems are trained with NLP using "crafted" utterances for any intent. For example, an utterance of "Would you like to change the price?" can be used to train a classifier model of the chatbot system to classify this type of utterance as the intent of "Would you like to offer a price match?" Training the model with crafted utterances helps to initially train the chatbot system to provide a service, which can then be retrained once it is deployed and begins to receive real utterances from users.

[0021] Traditional training of a model for text classification starts with training a dataset of utterances labeled with a predefined list of intents (or categories, or classes). For example, a banking chatbot may be trained with predefined intents such as "open an account", "query balance", "close an account", "transfer money", etc. These intents are generally considered to belong to the same domain (e.g., banking domain) that the chatbot can handle. Generally, a chatbot is trained using training data that comprises multiple examples of utterances and, for each training utterance, an intent associated with that utterance. Once training is complete, the chatbot can receive new utterances (e.g., in a real-world or production environment) and infer the intent for each utterance from the predefined intents.

[0022] However, the utterances that a chatbot receives from real users in a real-world environment (e.g., a production environment) can be quite diverse and noisy. Some of these received utterances can be very different from the utterances used to train the chatbot and may not fall within the scope of the intents that the chatbot is trained to infer and address. For example, a banking chatbot may receive utterances such as "How do I book a trip to Italy?" that are not related to banking. Such utterances are referred to as out-of-domain (OOD) utterances because they are not within the domain of the trained chatbot's intents. It is important that the chatbot system can identify such OOD utterances so that it can take appropriate response actions. For example, when a chatbot detects an OOD utterance, rather than selecting the closest matching intent, the chatbot can respond to the user to indicate that the utterance is not something the bot can handle or address.

[0023] Therefore, a different approach is needed to address these problems. Various embodiments are described in this disclosure to address these problems by identifying out-of-domain utterances. In various embodiments, a combination of clustering and metric-based techniques is used for OOD determination. One exemplary technique includes receiving an utterance and a target domain of a chatbot, generating sentence embeddings for the utterance, obtaining an embedding representation for each cluster of in-domain utterances associated with the target domain, predicting a first probability that the utterance will belong to the target domain based on similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings and each embedding representation for each cluster using a distance learning model, predicting a second probability that the utterance will belong to the target domain based on determined distances or density deviations between the sentence embeddings and embedding representations for adjacent clusters using an outlier detection model, evaluating the first probability and the second probability to determine a final probability, and classifying the utterance as in-domain or out-of-domain for the chatbot based on the final probability.

[0024] In a particular embodiment, a method is provided, the method comprising the steps of receiving an utterance and a target domain of a chatbot; generating a sentence embedding for the utterance; and obtaining an embedding representation for each cluster of a plurality of clusters of in-domain utterances associated with the target domain, the embedding representation for each cluster being an average of sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance in the cluster; the method further comprises the steps of inputting the sentence embedding for the utterance and the embedding representation for each cluster into a metric learning model, the metric learning model having trained model parameters configured to provide a first probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain or not; the method further comprises the steps of using the metric learning model to determine a similarity or difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster; and using the metric learning model to determine a similarity or difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster. inputting the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedding representations for each cluster into an outlier detection model, the outlier detection model being constructed with a distance or density algorithm for outlier detection, the method further comprising: using the outlier detection model to determine a distance or density deviation between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedding representations for adjacent clusters; using the outlier detection model to predict the second probability of the utterance belonging to the target domain or not based on the determined distance or density deviation; evaluating the first probability and the second probability to determine a final probability of the utterance belonging to the target domain or not; and classifying the utterance as being in-domain or out-domain for the chatbot based on the final probability.

[0025] Bots and Analytics Systems A bot (also referred to as a skill, chatbot, chatterbot, or talkbot) is a computer program that can converse with an end user. A bot can generally respond to natural language messages (e.g., questions or comments) through a messaging application using natural language messages. A business can use one or more bot systems to communicate with end users through messaging applications. A messaging application, which may be referred to as a channel, may be a messaging application selected by the end user that the end user already has installed and is familiar with. Thus, the end user does not have to download and install a new application to chat with a bot system. Messaging applications may include, for example, over-the-top (OTT) messaging channels (such as Facebook Messenger, Facebook WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, Kick, Telegram, Talk, Skype, Slack, or SMS), virtual private assistants (such as Amazon Dot, Echo or Show, Google Home, Apple HomePod, etc.), mobile and web app extensions that extend native or hybrid / responsive mobile apps or web applications with chat capabilities, or voice-based input (such as devices or apps with an interface that uses Siri, Cortana, Google Voice, or other voice input for interaction).

[0026] In some examples, the bot system may be associated with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The URI may identify the bot system using a string of characters. The URI may be used as a webhook for one or more messaging application systems. The URI may include, for example, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or a Uniform Resource Name (URN). The bot system may be designed to receive a message (e.g., a HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) post call message) from the messaging application system. The HTTP post call message may be directed to a URI from the messaging application system. In some embodiments, the message may be different than an HTTP post call message. For example, the bot system may receive a message from a Short Message Service (SMS). Although the description herein refers to a communication received by the bot system as a message, it should be understood that the message may be an HTTP post call message, an SMS message, or any other type of communication between the two systems.

[0027] End users may interact with bot systems through conversational interactions (sometimes referred to as conversational user interfaces (UIs)) similar to human-to-human interactions. In some cases, this interaction may involve the end user saying "hello" to the bot, with the bot responding with "hi" and asking the end user how they can help. In some cases, this interaction may be transaction-related with a banking bot, such as transferring money from one account to another, information-related with an HR bot, such as checking a vacation balance, or a retail bot, such as discussing the return of a purchase or requesting technical support.

[0028] In some embodiments, the bot system can intelligently handle end user interactions without interaction with an administrator or developer of the bot system. For example, an end user may send one or more messages to the bot system to achieve a desired goal. The messages may include specific content, such as text, emojis, voice, images, video, or other methods of conveying a message. In some embodiments, the bot system may convert this content into a standardized format (e.g., a Representational State Transfer (REST) ​​call to an enterprise service with appropriate parameters) to generate a natural language response. The bot system may also request additional input parameters from the end user or request other additional information. In some embodiments, the bot system may also initiate communication with the end user rather than passively responding to end user utterances. Various techniques are described herein for identifying explicit invocations of the bot system to determine input to the bot system being invoked. In certain embodiments, the analysis of the explicit invocation is performed by the master bot based on detecting an invocation name in the utterance. In response to detecting the invocation name, the utterance can be refined for input to a skill bot associated with the invocation name.

[0029] A conversation with a bot will follow a certain conversation flow that includes multiple states. This flow may define what happens next based on the input. In some embodiments, a bot system may be implemented using a state machine that includes user-defined states (e.g., end user intents) and actions to take at or for each state. A conversation can take different paths based on end user input, which may affect the decisions the bot makes for the flow. For example, at each state, based on end user input or utterances, the bot may determine the end user's intent to determine the next appropriate action to take. In the context of utterances, the term "intent" as used herein refers to the intent of the user who provided the utterance. For example, a user may intend to converse with a bot to order a pizza, and thus the user's intent may be expressed by the utterance "order a pizza". User intents may be directed to a particular task that the user wants the chatbot to perform on the user's behalf. Thus, utterances may be expressed as questions, commands, requests, etc. that reflect the user's intent. Intents may include goals that the end user wants to achieve.

[0030] In the context of configuring a chatbot, the term "intent" is used herein to refer to configuration information for mapping a user's utterance to a specific task / action or category of tasks / actions that the chatbot can perform. To distinguish between an utterance intent (i.e., a user intent) and a chatbot's intent, the latter may be referred to herein as a "bot intent." A bot intent may comprise a set of one or more utterances associated with the intent. For example, an intent to order pizza may have various permutations of utterances expressing a desire to order pizza. These associated utterances can be used to train an intent classifier of the chatbot so that it can later determine whether an input utterance from a user matches the pizza ordering intent. A bot intent may be associated with one or more dialog flows for initiating a conversation with a user in a particular state. For example, a first message for a pizza ordering intent may be the question, "What kind of pizza do you like?" In addition to the associated utterance, a bot intent may further comprise a named entity associated with the intent. For example, an order pizza intent may include variables or parameters used to perform the task of ordering a pizza, such as topping 1, topping 2, type of pizza, size of pizza, amount of pizza, etc. The values ​​of the entities are generally obtained by conversation with the user.

[0031] FIG. 1 is a simplified block diagram of an environment 100 incorporating a chatbot system, according to certain embodiments. The environment 100 includes a digital assistant builder platform (DABP) 102 that allows a user of the DABP 102 to create and deploy a digital assistant or chatbot system. The DABP 102 can be used to create one or more digital assistants (or DAs) or chatbot systems. For example, as shown in FIG. 1, a user 104 representing a particular business can use the DABP 102 to create and deploy a digital assistant 106 for users of the particular business. For example, the DABP 102 may be used by a bank to create one or more digital assistants for use by the bank's customers. The same DABP 102 platform may be used by multiple businesses to create digital assistants. As another example, an owner of a restaurant (e.g., a pizza shop) may use the DABP 102 to create and deploy a digital assistant that allows customers of the restaurant to order food (e.g., order pizza).

[0032] For purposes of this disclosure, a "digital assistant" is an entity that helps a user of the digital assistant accomplish various tasks through natural language conversation. A digital assistant may be implemented using only software (e.g., a digital assistant is a digital entity implemented using programs, codes, or instructions executable by one or more processors), hardware, or a combination of hardware and software. A digital assistant may be embodied or implemented in a variety of physical systems or devices, such as a computer, a mobile phone, a watch, an appliance, a vehicle, etc. A digital assistant may also be referred to as a chatbot system. Thus, for purposes of this disclosure, the terms digital assistant and chatbot system are interchangeable.

[0033] A digital assistant, such as a digital assistant 106 built using DABP 102, can be used to perform a variety of tasks through natural language-based conversations between the digital assistant and its user 108. As part of the conversation, the user may provide one or more user inputs 110 to the digital assistant 106 to obtain responses 112 from the digital assistant 106. The conversations may include one or more of the inputs 110 and the responses 112. Through these conversations, the user requests one or more tasks to be performed by the digital assistant, and in response, the digital assistant is configured to perform the user-requested tasks and respond to the user with an appropriate response.

[0034] The user input 110 is generally in the form of a natural language and is referred to as an utterance. The user utterance 110 may be in text form, such as when the user types a sentence, a question, a text fragment, or a single word and provides it as an input to the digital assistant 106. In some embodiments, the user utterance 110 may be in the form of voice input or speech, such as when the user says or speaks something and provides it as an input to the digital assistant 106. The utterance is generally in the language that the user 108 speaks. For example, the utterance may be in English or another language. If the utterance is in speech form, the speech input is converted into text form utterances in that particular language, and these text utterances are then processed by the digital assistant 106. Various speech-to-text processing techniques may be used to convert the speech or voice input into text utterances, which are then processed by the digital assistant 106. In some embodiments, the speech-to-text conversion may be done by the digital assistant 106 itself.

[0035] The utterance, which may be a text utterance or a speech utterance, may be a fragment, a sentence, multiple sentences, one or more words, one or more questions, a combination of the above types, and the like. The digital assistant 106 is configured to apply natural language understanding (NLU) techniques to the utterance to understand the meaning of the user input. As part of the NLU processing of the utterance, the digital assistant 106 is configured to perform processing to understand the meaning of the utterance, which processing includes identifying one or more intents and one or more entities that correspond to the utterance. In understanding the meaning of the utterance, the digital assistant 106 may perform one or more actions or operations in response to the understood meaning or intent. For purposes of this disclosure, it is assumed that the utterance is a text utterance provided directly by a user 108 of the digital assistant 106 or is the result of a conversion of an input speech utterance into text format. However, this is not intended to be limiting or restrictive in any manner.

[0036] For example, user 108 input may request to order a pizza by providing an utterance such as "I want to order a pizza." Upon receiving such an utterance, the digital assistant 106 is configured to understand the meaning of the utterance and take appropriate action. These appropriate actions may include responding to the user with a question requesting user input regarding, for example, the type of pizza the user wants to order, the size of the pizza, the pizza toppings, etc. Additionally, the responses provided by the digital assistant 106 may be in natural language format and generally in the same language as the input utterance. As part of generating these responses, the digital assistant 106 may perform natural language generation (NLG). If the user orders a pizza, through a conversation between the user and the digital assistant 106, the digital assistant may provide all the information required for a pizza order and then guide the user to order the pizza at the end of the conversation. The digital assistant 106 may end the conversation by outputting information to the user indicating that a pizza has been ordered.

[0037] At a conceptual level, the digital assistant 106 performs various processes in response to utterances received from a user. In some embodiments, this process includes a series or pipeline of processing steps, including, for example, understanding the meaning of the input utterance (sometimes referred to as natural language understanding (NLU)), determining an action to take in response to the utterance, causing the action to be taken as appropriate, generating a response in response to the user utterance that is output to the user, outputting the response to the user, etc. NLU processing may include parsing the received input utterance to understand the structure and meaning of the utterance, refining and refining the utterance to create a more understandable form (e.g., logical form) or structure of the utterance. Generating a response may include the use of NLG technology.

[0038] The NLU processing performed by a digital assistant such as the digital assistant 106 may include various NLP-related processing such as parsing a sentence (e.g., tokenizing, lemmatizing, identifying part-of-speech tags of an utterance, identifying named entities in a sentence, generating a dependency tree to represent the sentence structure, splitting the sentence into clauses, parsing individual clauses, breaking down phrasing, performing chunking, etc.). In certain embodiments, the NLU processing, or parts thereof, are performed by the digital assistant 106 itself. In some other embodiments, the digital assistant 106 may use other resources to perform parts of the NLU processing. For example, the syntax and structure of an input spoken sentence may be identified by processing the sentence using a parser, a part-of-speech tagger, and / or a named entity recognizer. In one implementation, for English, a parser, a part-of-speech tagger, and a named entity recognizer such as those provided by the Stanford Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group are used to parse the structure and syntax of the sentence. These are provided as part of the Stanford CoreNLP toolkit.

[0039] Although various examples provided in this disclosure show speech in English, this is intended as an example only. In certain embodiments, the digital assistant 106 can also handle speech in languages ​​other than English. The digital assistant 106 can provide subsystems (e.g., components that implement NLU functionality) configured to perform processing for various languages. These subsystems can be realized as pluggable units that can be invoked using service calls from the NLU core server. This makes the NLU processing flexible and extensible for each language, including allowing for various orders of processing. Language packs can be provided for individual languages, and the language packs can register a list of subsystems that can be served from the NLU core server.

[0040] A digital assistant, such as the digital assistant 106 shown in FIG. 1, may be made available or accessible to its user 108 through a variety of different channels, such as, but not limited to, through a specific application, through social media platforms, through various messaging services and applications, and other applications or channels. A single digital assistant may have several channels configured for it such that it runs on and is accessible by different services simultaneously.

[0041] A digital assistant or chatbot system generally includes or is associated with one or more skills. In certain embodiments, these skills are individual chatbots (referred to as skillbots) configured to interact with a user to perform a particular type of task, such as tracking inventory, submitting a timecard, creating an expense report, ordering food, checking a bank account, making a reservation, purchasing a widget, etc. For example, in the embodiment shown in FIG. 1, the digital assistant or chatbot system 106 includes skills 116-1, 116-2, etc. For purposes of this disclosure, the terms "skill" and "skills" are used interchangeably with the terms "skillbot" and "skillbots," respectively.

[0042] Each skill associated with the digital assistant helps a user of the digital assistant complete a task through a conversation with the user, which may include a combination of text or voice input provided by the user and responses provided by the skill bot. These responses may be in the form of text or voice messages to the user and / or using simple user interface elements (e.g., list selections) that are presented to the user for the user to make a selection.

[0043] There are various ways in which skills or skill bots can be associated or added to a digital assistant. In some cases, skill bots can be developed by a company and then added to a digital assistant using DABP 102. In other cases, skill bots can be developed and created using DABP 102 and then added to a digital assistant created using DABP 102. In still other cases, DABP 102 provides an online digital store (referred to as a "skill store") that offers multiple skills directed to a wide range of tasks. Skills offered through the skill store may also expose various cloud services. To add a skill to a digital assistant created using DABP 102, a user of DABP 102 can access the skill store via DABP 102, select the desired skill, and indicate that the selected skill is to be added to the digital assistant created using DABP 102. Skills from the skill store may be added to the digital assistant as is, or may be added to the digital assistant in a modified form (e.g., a user of the DABP 102 may select and clone a particular skillbot provided by the skill store, make customizations or modifications to the selected skillbot, and then add the modified skillbot to a digital assistant created using the DABP 102).

[0044] A variety of different architectures may be used to realize a digital assistant or chatbot system. For example, in certain embodiments, a digital assistant created and deployed using DABP 102 may be realized using a masterbot / child (or sub)bot paradigm or architecture. According to this paradigm, a digital assistant is realized as a masterbot that interacts with one or more childbots, which are skillbots. For example, in the embodiment shown in FIG. 1, the digital assistant 106 comprises a masterbot 114 and skillbots 116-1, 116-2, etc., that are childbots of the masterbot 114. In certain embodiments, the digital assistant 106 itself may function as a masterbot.

[0045] A digital assistant realized according to the master-childbot architecture allows a user of the digital assistant to interact with multiple skills through a unified user interface, i.e., through the masterbot. When a user engages with the digital assistant, the user input is received by the masterbot. The masterbot then performs processing to determine the meaning of the user input utterance. The masterbot then determines whether the masterbot itself can handle the task requested by the user in the utterance, otherwise the masterbot selects an appropriate skillbot to handle the user request and routes the conversation to the selected skillbot. This allows a user to converse with the digital assistant through a common single interface, while still providing the ability to use several skillbots configured to perform specific tasks. For example, in a digital assistant developed for an enterprise, the masterbot of this digital assistant may connect to skillbots with specific capabilities, such as a CRM bot for performing functions related to customer relationship management (CRM), an ERP bot for performing functions related to enterprise resource planning (ERP), and an HCM bot for performing functions related to human capital management (HCM). In this way, the end user or consumer of the digital assistant only needs to know how to access the digital assistant through a common master bot interface, and behind the scenes, multiple skill bots are provided to handle user requests.

[0046] In a particular embodiment, in the masterbot / childbot infrastructure, the masterbot is configured to be aware of a list of available skillbots. The masterbot has access to metadata that identifies the various available skillbots and, for each skillbot, the skillbot's capabilities, including the tasks the skillbot can perform. Upon receiving a user request in the form of an utterance, the masterbot is configured to identify or predict a particular skillbot from a plurality of available skillbots that can best serve or process the user request. The masterbot then routes the utterance (or a portion of the utterance) to that particular skillbot for further processing. Thus, control flows from the masterbot to the skillbot. The masterbot can support multiple input and output channels. In a particular embodiment, the routing may be performed with the aid of processing performed by one or more available skillbots. For example, as described below, the skillbot can be trained to infer the intent of the utterance and determine whether the inferred intent matches an intent for which the skillbot is configured. Thus, the routing performed by the masterbot may include the skillbot communicating to the masterbot an indication of whether the skillbot is configured with an intent suitable for processing the utterance.

[0047] 1 illustrates a digital assistant 106 with a masterbot 114 and skillbots 116-1, 116-2, and 116-3, but this is not intended to be limiting. The digital assistant may include various other components (e.g., other systems and subsystems) that provide the functionality of the digital assistant. These systems and subsystems may be implemented solely in software (e.g., code, instructions stored on a computer-readable medium and executable by one or more processors), solely in hardware, or in an implementation using a combination of software and hardware.

[0048] DABP 102 provides infrastructure and various services and features that enable a user of DABP 102 to create a digital assistant including one or more skillbots associated with the digital assistant. In some cases, a skillbot can be created by cloning an existing skillbot, for example, cloning a skillbot provided by a skill store. As described above, DABP 102 provides a skill store or skill catalog that provides multiple skillbots for performing various tasks. A user of DABP 102 can clone a skillbot from this skill store. Modifications or customizations may be made to the cloned skillbot as needed. In some other cases, a user of DABP 102 creates a skillbot from scratch using tools and services provided by DABP 102. As described above, a skill store or skill catalog provided by DABP 102 may provide multiple skillbots for performing various tasks.

[0049] In certain embodiments, broadly speaking, creating or customizing a skillbot includes the following steps:

[0050] (1) Steps to configure a new skill bot (2) configuring one or more intents for the skill bot; (3) configuring one or more entities for one or more intents; (4) training the skill bot; (5) Creating a dialogue flow for the skill bot (6) Add custom components to the skill bot as needed. (7) Test and deploy the skill bot Each of the above steps is briefly described below.

[0051] (1) Configuring Settings for a New Skillbot - Various settings can be configured for a skillbot. For example, a skillbot designer can specify one or more invocation names for the skillbot being created. A user of the digital assistant can then explicitly invoke the skillbot using these invocation names. For example, a user can enter an invocation name in a user utterance to explicitly invoke the corresponding skillbot.

[0052] (2) Configuring one or more intents and associated example utterances for the skillbot - A skillbot designer specifies one or more intents (also referred to as bot intents) for the skillbot being created. The skillbot is then trained based on these specified intents. These intents represent categories or classes of input utterances that the skillbot is trained to infer. Upon receiving an utterance, the trained skillbot infers the intent of the utterance, and the inferred intent is selected from a predefined set of intents used to train the skillbot. The skillbot then takes an appropriate action in response to the utterance based on the intent inferred for the utterance. In some cases, the intents of the skillbot represent tasks that the skillbot can perform for a user of the digital assistant. Each intent is given an intent identifier or intent name. For example, in a skillbot trained for banking, the intents specified for the skillbot may include "CheckBalance", "TransferMoney", "DepositCheck", etc.

[0053] For each intent defined for a skillbot, the skillbot designer may also provide one or more example utterances that represent and explain the intent. These example utterances are intended to represent utterances that a user may input to the skillbot for that intent. For example, for a CheckBalance intent, example utterances may include "What's the balance in my savings account?", "How much is in my checking account?", "How much do I have in my account?", etc. Thus, various permutations of typical user utterances may be specified as example utterances for an intent.

[0054] The intents and their associated example utterances are used as training data to train the skill bot. A variety of different training techniques may be used. This training results in a predictive model that is configured to take an utterance as input and output an intent for the utterance that is inferred by the predictive model. In some cases, the input utterance is provided to an intent parsing engine that is configured to predict or infer an intent for the input utterance using the trained model. The skill bot may then take one or more actions based on the inferred intent.

[0055] (3) Configuring entities for one or more intents for the skill bot - In some cases, additional context may be necessary to enable the skill bot to respond appropriately to a user utterance. For example, there may be situations where a user input utterance resolves to the same intent in the skill bot. For example, in the above example, the utterances "What's the balance in my savings account?" and "How much do I have in my checking account?" both resolve to the same CheckBalance intent, but these utterances are different requests that ask for different things. To account for such requests, one or more entities are added to the intent. Using the banking skill bot example, an entity called AccountType that defines values ​​called "checking" and "regular" may enable the skill bot to parse the user request and respond appropriately. In the above example, the utterance resolves to the same intent, but the values ​​associated with the AccountType entity are different for these two utterances. This allows the skill bot to potentially take different actions for two utterances even though they resolve to the same intent. One or more entities may be specified for a particular intent configured for the skill bot. Therefore, entities are used to add context to the intent itself: they help to more fully describe the intent and enable the skill bot to complete the user request.

[0056] In a particular embodiment, there are two types of entities: (a) built-in entities provided by DABP 102 and (2) custom entities that can be specified by a skill bot designer. Built-in entities are generic entities that can be used with a wide variety of bots. Examples of built-in entities include, but are not limited to, time, date, address, number, email address, duration, recurring period, currency, phone number, URL, etc. Custom entities are used for more customized applications. For example, in a banking skill, an AccountType entity can be defined by the skill bot designer that enables various banking transactions by checking the user input for keywords such as checking, regular, and credit card.

[0057] (4) Training the skillbot - the skillbot is configured to receive user input in the form of an utterance and parse or process the received input to identify or select an intent associated with the received user input. As described above, the skillbot must be trained for this. In certain embodiments, the skillbot is trained based on intents configured for the skillbot and example utterances associated with the intents (collectively, training data) so that the skillbot can break down user input utterances into one of its configured intents. In certain embodiments, the skillbot is trained using the training data to use a predictive model that allows the skillbot to discern what the user is saying (or, in some cases, what they are trying to say). DABP 102 provides a variety of different training techniques that the skillbot designer can use to train the skillbot, including various machine learning based training techniques, rule-based training techniques, and / or combinations thereof. In certain embodiments, a portion of the training data (e.g., 80%) is used to train the skillbot model and another portion (e.g., the remaining 20%) is used to test or validate the model. Once trained, the trained model (sometimes referred to as a trained skill bot) can be used to process and respond to user utterances. In certain cases, the user utterance may be a question that requires only one answer and no further conversation. To address such situations, a Q&A (Question and Answer) intent can be defined for the skill bot. This allows the skill bot to output an answer to a user request without the need to update the dialog definition. A Q&A intent is created in a similar manner to a normal intent. The dialog flow for a Q&A intent may be different from that of a normal intent.

[0058] (5) Creating a dialog flow for the skill bot - The dialog flow specified for the skill bot describes how the skill bot reacts as the skill bot's various intents are resolved in response to received user input. This dialog flow defines the behavior or actions the skill bot takes, e.g., how the skill bot responds to user utterances, how the skill bot prompts the user for input, and how the skill bot returns data. The dialog flow is similar to a flowchart that the skill bot follows. Skill bot designers specify the dialog flow using a language such as Markdown language. In certain embodiments, a version of YAML called OBotML may be used to specify the dialog flow for a skill bot. The dialog flow definition for a skill bot serves as a model of the conversation itself, i.e., a model that allows the skill bot designer to compose the interaction between the skill bot and the user that the skill bot serves.

[0059] In certain embodiments, a skill bot's dialog flow definition includes three sections:

[0060] (a) Context Section (b) Default transition section (c) Status Section Context Section - A skill bot designer can define variables that will be used in the conversation flow in the context section. Other variables that can be named in the context section include, but are not limited to, variables for error handling, variables for built-in or custom entities, user variables that allow the skill bot to recognize and persist user preferences, etc.

[0061] Default Transitions Section - Transitions for a skill bot can be defined in the dialog flow state section or the default transitions section. Transitions defined in the default transitions section act as fallbacks and are triggered when there are no applicable transitions defined within a state or when the conditions required to trigger a state transition cannot be met. The default transitions section can be used to define routing that allows the skill bot to deal gracefully with unexpected user actions.

[0062] State Section - A dialog flow and its associated behaviors are defined as a set of temporary states that govern the logic within the dialog flow. Each state node in a dialog flow definition names a component that provides the functionality needed at that point in the dialog. Thus, states are built around components. A state contains characteristics specific to a component and defines the transitions to other states that are triggered after the component is executed.

[0063] The state section may be used to address special case scenarios. For example, there may be times when you want to provide the user with the option to temporarily leave a first skill that the user is involved in and do something in a second skill within the digital assistant. For example, if a user interacts with a shopping skill (e.g., makes a purchase selection), they may want to jump to a banking skill (e.g., make sure they have enough money for the purchase), and then return to the shopping skill to complete the user's order. To address this, an action in a first skill may be configured to return to the original flow after initiating an interaction with a second, different skill within the same digital assistant.

[0064] (6) Adding custom components to the skillbot - As described above, states specified in the dialog flow of a skillbot name components that provide the necessary functionality corresponding to those states. The components enable the skillbot to perform the functionality. In certain embodiments, DABP 102 provides a set of pre-configured components to perform a wide range of functions. A skillbot designer can select one or more of these pre-configured components and associate them with states in the dialog flow of the skillbot. A skillbot designer can also create custom or new components using tools provided by DABP 102 and associate these custom components with one or more states in the dialog flow of the skillbot.

[0065] (7) Testing and Deploying the Skillbot - DABP 102 provides several features that allow a skillbot designer to test the skillbot being developed. The skillbot can then be deployed and included in a digital assistant.

[0066] While the above description describes how to create a skillbot, similar techniques may also be used to create a digital assistant (or masterbot). At the masterbot or digital assistant level, built-in system intents may be configured for the digital assistant. These built-in system intents are used to identify common tasks that the digital assistant itself (i.e., the masterbot) can handle without invoking a skillbot associated with the digital assistant. Examples of system intents defined for a masterbot include: (1) Exit: applied when a user communicates a desire to exit the current conversation or context in the digital assistant; (2) Help: applied when a user requests help or orientation; and (3) UnresolvedIntent: applied to user input that does not match well with the exit and help intents. The digital assistant also stores information about one or more skillbots associated with the digital assistant. This information allows the masterbot to select a specific skillbot to process an utterance.

[0067] At the Masterbot or digital assistant level, when a user inputs a phrase or utterance into the digital assistant, the digital assistant is configured to perform processing to determine how to route the utterance and associated conversation. The digital assistant determines this using a routing model, which may be rule-based, AI-based, or a combination thereof. The digital assistant uses this routing model to determine whether the conversation corresponding to the user input utterance is routed to a specific skill for processing, is processed by the digital assistant or Masterbot itself per built-in system intent, or is processed as a different state in the current conversation flow.

[0068] In certain embodiments, as part of this processing, the digital assistant determines whether the user input utterance explicitly identifies a skill bot using its invocation name. If the invocation name is present in the user input, it is treated as an explicit invocation of the skill bot corresponding to the invocation name. In such a scenario, the digital assistant may route the user input to the explicitly invoked skill bot for further processing. In the absence of a specific or explicit invocation, in certain embodiments, the digital assistant evaluates the received user input utterance to calculate a confidence score of the system intent and the skill bot associated with the digital assistant. The calculated score of the skill bot or system intent indicates how likely the user input represents the task that the skill bot is configured to perform or represents the system intent. Any system intent or skill bot whose associated calculated confidence score exceeds a threshold (e.g., a confidence threshold routing parameter) is selected as a candidate for further evaluation. The digital assistant then selects a specific system intent or skill bot from the identified candidates for further processing of the user input utterance. In a particular embodiment, after one or more skill bots are identified as candidates, the intents associated with the candidate skills are evaluated (according to the intent model for each skill) and a confidence score is determined for each intent. Generally, any intent with a confidence score above a threshold (e.g., 70%) is treated as a candidate intent. Once a particular skill bot is selected, the user utterance is routed to that skill bot for further processing. Once a system intent is selected, one or more actions are performed by the master bot itself according to the selected system intent.

[0069] FIG. 2 is a simplified block diagram of a Masterbot (MB) system 200, according to certain embodiments. The MB system 200 may be implemented solely in software, solely in hardware, or in a combination of hardware and software. The MB system 200 includes a pre-processing subsystem 210, a multiple intent subsystem (MIS) 220, an explicit invocation subsystem (EIS) 230, a skillbot invoker 240, and a data store 250. The MB system 200 shown in FIG. 2 is only one example of an arrangement of components in a Masterbot. Those skilled in the art will recognize many possible modifications, alternatives, and variations. For example, in some implementations, the MB system 200 may have more or fewer systems or components than those shown in FIG. 2, may combine two or more subsystems, or may have a different configuration or arrangement of subsystems.

[0070] The pre-processing subsystem 210 receives an utterance "A" 202 from a user and processes the utterance via a language detector 212 and a language parser 214. As noted above, the utterance can be provided in a variety of forms, including audio or text. The utterance 202 may be a sentence fragment, a complete sentence, multiple sentences, etc. The utterance 202 may include punctuation. For example, if the utterance 202 is provided as audio, the pre-processing subsystem 210 may convert the audio to text using a speech-to-text converter (not shown), which inserts punctuation marks, such as commas, semicolons, periods, etc., into the resulting text.

[0071] The language detector 212 detects the language of the utterance 202 based on the text of the utterance 202. The manner in which the utterance 202 is processed is language dependent, since each language has its own grammar and semantics, and differences between languages ​​are taken into account when analyzing the syntax and structure of the utterance.

[0072] The language parser 214 parses the utterance 202 to extract part-of-speech (POS) tags for individual linguistic units (e.g., words) in the utterance 202. POS tags include, for example, nouns (NN), pronouns (PN), verbs (VB), etc. The language parser 214 may also tokenize the linguistic units of the utterance 202 (e.g., converting each word into a separate token) and lemmatize the words. A lemma is the primary form of a set of words as found in a dictionary (e.g., "run" is a lemma for run, runs, ran, running, etc.). Other types of preprocessing that the language parser 214 may perform include chunking of compound expressions, for example combining "credit" and "card" into one expression, "credit_card". The language parser 214 may also identify relationships between words in the utterance 202. For example, in some embodiments, the language parser 214 generates a dependency tree that indicates which parts of the utterance (e.g., particular nouns) are direct objects, which parts of the utterance are prepositions, etc. The results of the processing performed by the language parser 214 form the extracted information 205, which is provided as input to the MIS 220 along with the utterance 202 itself.

[0073] As noted above, utterance 202 may include more than one sentence. For purposes of multiple intent and explicit invocation detection, utterance 202 may be treated as a single unit even though it contains multiple sentences. However, in certain embodiments, preprocessing may be performed, for example by preprocessing subsystem 210, to identify a single sentence within the multiple sentences for multiple intent and explicit invocation analysis. In general, the results generated by MIS 220 and EIS 230 are substantially identical regardless of whether utterance 202 is processed at the level of individual sentences or as a single unit containing multiple sentences.

[0074] The MIS 220 determines whether the utterance 202 expresses multiple intents. Although the MIS 220 can detect the presence of multiple intents in the utterance 202, the process performed by the MIS 220 does not include determining whether the intent of the utterance 202 matches any intent configured for the bot. Instead, the process for determining whether the intent of the utterance 202 matches a bot intent can be performed by the intent classifier 242 of the MB system 200 or the intent classifier of the skill bot (shown in the embodiment of FIG. 3). The process performed by the MIS 220 assumes that there is a bot (e.g., a particular skill bot or the master bot itself) that can process the utterance 202. Thus, the process performed by the MIS 220 does not require knowledge of what bots are in the chatbot system (e.g., the identity of the skill bot registered with the master bot) or what intents have been configured for a particular bot.

[0075] To determine that an utterance 202 includes multiple intents, the MIS 220 applies one or more rules from a set of rules 252 in the data store 250. The rules applied to the utterance 202 depend on the language of the utterance 202 and may include a sentence pattern that indicates the presence of multiple intents. For example, the sentence pattern may include a coordinating conjunction (e.g., a conjunction) that joins two parts of a sentence, both parts corresponding to separate intents. If the utterance 202 matches the sentence pattern, it can be inferred that the utterance 202 represents multiple intents. Note that an utterance with multiple intents does not necessarily have different intents (e.g., intents directed to different bots or intents directed to different intents within the same bot). Instead, the utterance may have separate instances of the same intent, such as "order pizza using payment account X, then order pizza using payment account Y."

[0076] As part of determining that utterance 202 represents multiple intents, MIS 220 also determines which portions of utterance 202 are associated with each intent. For each intent represented in the multiple intent utterance, MIS 220 constructs a new utterance for separate processing to replace the original utterance, e.g., utterance “B” 206 and utterance “C” 208 shown in FIG. 2 . Thus, original utterance 202 may be split into two or more separate utterances that are processed one at a time. MIS 220 determines which of the two or more utterances should be processed first using extracted information 205 and / or from an analysis of utterance 202 itself. For example, MIS 220 may determine that utterance 202 includes a marker word that indicates that a particular intent should be processed first. The newly formed utterance corresponding to this particular intent (e.g., one of utterance 206 or utterance 208) is sent first for further processing by EIS 230. After the conversation triggered by the first utterance has ended (or has been temporarily interrupted), the next highest priority utterance (e.g., the other of utterance 206 or utterance 208) may be sent to EIS 230 for processing.

[0077] The EIS 230 determines whether the utterance it receives (e.g., utterance 206 or utterance 208) includes an invocation name of the skillbot. In certain embodiments, each skillbot in the chatbot system is assigned a unique invocation name that distinguishes the skillbot from other skillbots in the chatbot system. A list of invocation names can be maintained in the data store 250 as part of the skillbot information 254. An utterance is considered to be an explicit invocation if the utterance includes a word match with the invocation name. If the bot is not explicitly invoked, the utterance received by the EIS 230 is considered to be an implicit invocation utterance 234 and input to an intent classifier (e.g., intent classifier 242) of the masterbot to determine which bot to use to process the utterance. In some cases, the intent classifier 242 determines that the masterbot should process the implicit invocation utterance. In other cases, the intent classifier 242 determines which skillbot the utterance is routed to for processing.

[0078] The explicit invocation feature provided by the EIS 230 has several advantages. It can reduce the amount of processing that the masterbot must perform. For example, when there is an explicit invocation, the masterbot may not have to perform intent classification analysis (e.g., using the intent classifier 242) or may reduce the intent classification analysis that it must perform to select a skillbot. Thus, the explicit invocation analysis can enable the selection of a particular skillbot without relying on intent classification analysis.

[0079] Also, there may be situations where there is overlap in functionality between multiple skillbots. This can happen, for example, when the intents handled by two skillbots overlap or are very close to each other. In such a situation, it would be difficult for the masterbot to identify which of the multiple skillbots should be selected based on intent classification analysis alone. In such a scenario, an explicit invocation would clarify the specific skillbot to be used.

[0080] In addition to determining that the utterance is an explicit invocation, EIS 230 is responsible for determining whether any portion of the utterance should be used as input to the skill bot being explicitly invoked. In particular, EIS 230 may determine whether any portion of the utterance is not associated with an invocation. EIS 230 may make this determination through analysis of the utterance and / or analysis of the extracted information 205. Instead of sending the entire utterance received by EIS 230, EIS 230 may send the portion of the utterance that is not associated with the invocation to the invoked skill bot. In some cases, the input to the invoked skill bot is formed by simply removing any portion of the utterance that is associated with the invocation. For example, "I would like to order a pizza using Pizza Bot" may be shortened to "I would like to order a pizza" because "using Pizza Bot" is related to the invocation of Pizza Bot but is unrelated to the processing performed by Pizza Bot. In some cases, EIS 230 may reformat the portion sent to the invoked bot, for example to form a complete sentence. Thus, EIS 230 determines not only that there is an explicit call, but also what to send to the skillbot when there is an explicit call. In some cases, there may be no text to input to the bot being called. For example, if the utterance is "pizzabot," EIS 230 will determine that the pizzabot is being called, but there is no text to be processed by the pizzabot. In such a scenario, EIS 230 may inform the skillbot invoker 240 that there is nothing to send.

[0081] The skillbot invoker 240 invokes a skillbot in various ways. For example, the skillbot invoker 240 can invoke the bot in response to receiving an indication 235 that a particular skillbot has been selected as a result of an explicit invocation. The indication 235 can be sent by the EIS 230 along with an input to the explicitly invoked skillbot. In this scenario, the skillbot invoker 240 will relinquish control of the conversation to the explicitly invoked skillbot. The explicitly invoked skillbot determines an appropriate response to the input from the EIS 230 by treating the input as a standalone utterance. For example, the response can be to perform a particular action or to start a new conversation in a particular state where the initial state of the new conversation depends on the input sent from the EIS 230.

[0082] Another way that the skillbot invoker 240 can invoke a skillbot is through an implicit invocation using the intent classifier 242. The intent classifier 242 can be trained using machine learning and / or rule-based training techniques to determine the likelihood that an utterance represents a task that a particular skillbot is configured to perform. The intent classifier 242 is trained for different classes, one class for each skillbot. For example, each time a new skillbot is registered with the masterbot, the intent classifier 242 can be trained using a list of example utterances associated with the new skillbot to determine the likelihood that a particular utterance represents a task that the new skillbot can perform. The parameters (e.g., a set of values ​​for the parameters of the machine learning model) generated as a result of this training can be stored as part of the skillbot information 254.

[0083] In certain embodiments, the intent classifier 242 is implemented using a machine learning model, as described in further detail herein. Training the machine learning model may include inputting at least a subset of utterances from example utterances associated with various skill bots and generating as an output of the machine learning model an inference about which bot is the correct bot to process any particular training utterance. For each training utterance, an indication that the correct bot is used with this training utterance may be provided as ground truth information. The behavior of the machine learning model may then be adapted (e.g., via backpropagation) to minimize the difference between the generated inference and the ground truth information.

[0084] In certain embodiments, the intent classifier 242 determines a confidence score for each skillbot registered with the masterbot, which indicates the likelihood that the skillbot can process the utterance (e.g., the implicit invocation utterance 234 received from the EIS 230). The intent classifier 242 may also determine a confidence score for each configured system-level intent (e.g., help, exit). If a particular confidence score satisfies one or more conditions, the skillbot invoker 240 will invoke the bot associated with this particular confidence score. For example, a threshold confidence score value may need to be met. Thus, the output 245 of the intent classifier 242 is either an identification of a system intent or an identification of a particular skillbot. In some embodiments, in addition to meeting the threshold confidence score value, the confidence score must exceed the next highest confidence score by a certain win margin. Imposing such a condition would allow routing to a particular skillbot if each of the confidence scores of multiple skillbots exceeds the threshold confidence score value.

[0085] After identifying the bot based on the evaluation of the confidence score, the skillbot invoker 240 hands over to the identified bot. In the case of a system intent, the identified bot is a masterbot. In other cases, the identified bot is a skillbot. Furthermore, the skillbot invoker 240 determines what to provide as input 247 to the identified bot. As mentioned above, in the case of an explicit invoke, the input 247 may be based on a portion of the utterance that is not associated with this invoke, or the input 247 may be nothing (e.g., an empty string). In the case of an implicit invoke, the input 247 may be the entire utterance.

[0086] The data store 250 comprises one or more computing devices that store data used by various subsystems of the masterbot system 200. As described above, the data store 250 includes rules 252 and skillbot information 254. The rules 252 include rules for determining, for example, by the MIS 220 when an utterance represents multiple intents and how to split an utterance representing multiple intents. The rules 252 further include rules for determining, by the EIS 230, which part of an utterance that explicitly invokes a skillbot is sent to the skillbot. The skillbot information 254 includes the invocation names of the skillbots in the chatbot system, for example, a list of the invocation names of all skillbots registered to a particular masterbot. The skillbot information 254 may also include a confidence score for each skillbot in the chatbot system, for example, information used by the intent classifier 242 to determine parameters of a machine learning model.

[0087] 3 is a simplified block diagram of a Skillbot system 300, according to certain embodiments. The Skillbot system 300 is a computing system that can be implemented in software only, hardware only, or a combination of hardware and software. In certain embodiments, such as the embodiment shown in FIG. 1, the Skillbot system 300 can be used to implement one or more Skillbots within a digital assistant.

[0088] The skillbot system 300 includes an MIS 310, an intent classifier 320, and a conversation manager 330. The MIS 310 is similar to the MIS 220 in FIG. 2 and provides similar functionality, including being operable to determine, using rules 352 in a data store 350, (1) whether an utterance represents multiple intents, and if so, (2) how to split the utterance into separate utterances for each of the multiple intents. In certain embodiments, the rules applied by the MIS 310 to detect multiple intents and to split the utterance are identical to the rules applied by the MIS 220. The MIS 310 receives the utterance 302 and the extracted information 304. The extracted information 304 is similar to the extracted information 205 in FIG. 1 and can be generated using the language parser 214 or a language parser local to the skillbot system 300.

[0089] The intent classifier 320 may be trained in a manner similar to the intent classifier 242 described above in connection with the embodiment of FIG. 2 and as described in further detail herein. For example, in certain embodiments, the intent classifier 320 is implemented using a machine learning model. The machine learning model of the intent classifier 320 is trained for a particular skill bot using at least a subset of example utterances associated with the particular skill bot as training utterances. The ground truth for each training utterance will be the particular bot intent associated with the training utterance.

[0090] The utterance 302 may be received directly from a user or provided via a masterbot. If the utterance 302 is provided via a masterbot, for example as a result of processing via the MIS 220 and the EIS 230 in the embodiment shown in FIG. 2, the MIS 310 may be bypassed to avoid repeating processing already performed by the MIS 220. However, if the utterance 302 is received directly from a user, for example during a conversation that occurs after routing to a skillbot, the MIS 310 may process the utterance 302 to determine whether the utterance 302 represents multiple intents. If so, the MIS 310 applies one or more rules to split the utterance 302 into separate utterances for each intent, for example, utterance "D" 306 and utterance "E" 308. If the utterance 302 does not represent multiple intents, the MIS 310 forwards the utterance 302 to the intent classifier 320 for intent classification without splitting the utterance 302.

[0091] The intent classifier 320 is configured to match a received utterance (e.g., utterance 306 or 308) with an intent associated with the skillbot system 300. As described above, a skillbot may be configured with one or more intents, each of which includes at least one example utterance associated with the intent and used to train the classifier. In the embodiment of FIG. 2, the intent classifier 242 of the masterbot system 200 is trained to determine a confidence score for each individual skillbot and a confidence score for the system intent. Similarly, the intent classifier 320 may be trained to determine a confidence score for each intent associated with the skillbot system 300. The classification performed by the intent classifier 242 is at the bot level, whereas the classification performed by the intent classifier 320 is at the intent level, and therefore more fine-grained. The intent classifier 320 has access to intent information 354. The intent information 354 includes, for each intent associated with the skillbot system 300, a list of utterances that describe and explain the meaning of the intent and are generally associated with the tasks that can be performed by that intent. The intent information 354 may further include parameters generated as a result of training on the list of utterances.

[0092] The conversation manager 330 receives as an output of the intent classifier 320 an indication 322 that the particular intent identified by the intent classifier 320 best matches the utterance input to the intent classifier 320. In some cases, the intent classifier 320 is unable to determine any match. For example, if the utterance is directed to a system intent or to an intent of a different skillbot, the confidence score calculated by the intent classifier 320 may fall below a threshold confidence score value. When this occurs, the skillbot system 300 may refer the utterance to the masterbot for processing, e.g., for routing to a different skillbot. However, if the intent classifier 320 is successful in identifying the intent in the skillbot, the conversation manager 330 begins a conversation with the user.

[0093] A conversation initiated by the conversation manager 330 is a conversation specific to an intent identified by the intent classifier 320. For example, the conversation manager 330 may be realized using a state machine configured to execute a dialog flow for the identified intent. The state machine may include a default start state (e.g., the intent is invoked without any additional input) and one or more further states, each state associated with an action to be performed by the skill bot (e.g., perform a purchase transaction) and / or a dialog (e.g., question, response) to be presented to the user. Thus, the conversation manager 330 may determine an action / dialog 335 upon receiving an indication 322 identifying an intent, and may determine further actions or dialogs in response to subsequent utterances received during the conversation.

[0094] The data store 350 comprises one or more computing devices that store data used by various subsystems of the Skillbot system 300. As shown in Figure 3, the data store 350 includes rules 352 and intent information 354. In certain embodiments, the data store 350 can be integrated into a masterbot or digital assistant data store, such as data store 250 in Figure 2.

[0095] Systems and Architectures for OOD Detection When an utterance is received by a chatbot, the chatbot must accurately determine whether the utterance is an in-domain or out-of-domain utterance. It has been found that models used to classify utterances as intents can be overconfident and provide poor results for texts that are OOD. To overcome this problem, various embodiments are directed to a technique that uses a clustering-based approach and a metric-based approach to calculate the probability as to whether the utterance belongs to a target domain (e.g., a given skill bot). The calculated probabilities from the clustering-based approach and the metric-based approach are then combined into an ensemble approach to get the best from both the clustering-based approach and the metric-based approach. This ensemble approach finally classifies the utterance as in-domain or out-of-domain for the target domain based on the final combined probability.

[0096] FIG. 4 is a block diagram illustrating aspects of a chatbot system 400 configured to train and utilize a classifier (e.g., intent classifier 242 or 320 described with respect to FIG. 2 and FIG. 3) based on text data 405. As shown in FIG. 4, the text classification performed by the chatbot system 400 in this example includes various stages: a predictive model training stage 410, a skillbot invocation stage 415 to determine the likelihood that an utterance represents a task that a particular skillbot is configured to perform (e.g., in-domain or out-of-domain), and an intent prediction stage 420 to classify the utterance as one or more intents. The predictive model training stage 410 builds and trains one or more predictive models 425a-425n (where "n" represents any natural number) (which may be referred to herein individually or collectively as predictive models 425) that are used by the other stages. For example, the predictive models 425 may include one or more models (or an ensemble of models) for determining the likelihood that an utterance represents a task that a particular skillbot is configured to perform (e.g., calculating a probability as to whether the utterance belongs to a target domain), another model for predicting an intent from an utterance for a first type of skillbot, and another model for predicting an intent from an utterance for a second type of skillbot. Other types of predictive models may be implemented in other examples of the present disclosure.

[0097] The predictive model 425 may be a machine learning ("ML") model such as a convolutional neural network ("CNN") (e.g., an Inception Neural Network, a Residual Neural Network ("Resnet")), or a recurrent neural network (e.g., a long short-term memory ("LSTM") model or a gated recurrent unit ("GRU") model), other variants of a deep neural network ("DNN") (e.g., a stacked highway network, a wide and deep learning network with linear models and deep neural networks, a multi-label n-binary DNN classifier, or a multi-class DNN classifier for single intent classification). The predictive model 425 may also be other suitable ML models trained for natural language processing, such as a naive Bayes classifier, a linear classifier, a support vector machine, a bagging model such as a random forest model, a boosting model, a shallow neural network, or one or more combinations of such techniques (e.g., a CNN-HMM or an MCNN (multi-scale convolutional neural network)). The chatbot system 400 may utilize the same or different types of predictive models to predict intents from utterances for a first type of skillbot and to predict intents from utterances for a second type of skillbot to determine the likelihood that an utterance represents a task that a particular skillbot is configured to perform. Other types of predictive models may be implemented in other examples of the present disclosure.

[0098] To train the various predictive models 425, the training stage 410 is composed of three main components: dataset preparation 430, feature engineering 435, and model training 440. Dataset preparation 430 includes the process of loading data assets 445 and splitting the data assets 445 into training and validation sets 445a-n to perform basic pre-processing so that the system can train and test the predictive models 425. The data assets 445 may include at least a subset of utterances from example utterances associated with the various skill bots. As noted above, the utterances can be provided in a variety of forms, including audio or text. The utterances may be sentence fragments, complete sentences, multiple sentences, etc. For example, if the utterances are provided as audio, data preparation 430 may convert the audio to text using a speech-to-text converter (not shown), which inserts punctuation marks, such as commas, semicolons, periods, etc., into the resulting text. In some instances, the example utterances are provided by a client or customer. In other cases, the example utterances are automatically generated from a library of prior utterances (e.g., identifying utterances from the library that are specific to the skill that the chatbot is to learn). The data assets 445 for the predictive model 425 may include input text or speech (or input features of text or speech frames) and labels 450 corresponding to the input text or speech (or input features) as a matrix or table of values. For example, for each training utterance, an indication that the correct bot is used with the training utterance may be provided as ground truth information for the labels 450. The behavior of the predictive model 425 may then be adapted (e.g., via backpropagation) to minimize the difference between the generated inference and the ground truth information. Alternatively, the predictive model 425 may be trained for a particular skill bot using at least a subset of the example utterances associated with the particular skill bot as training utterances. The ground truth information for the labels 450 for each training utterance would be the particular bot intent associated with the training utterance.

[0099] In various embodiments, data preparation 430 includes OOD data augmentation 455 of data assets 445 to include OOD utterance examples in various contexts to make predictive models 425 more resilient to OOD utterances. By augmenting data assets 445 with OOD examples in various contexts, predictive models 425 become better at focusing on the most important parts of these examples and the context that connects them to their classes, including OOD classes. The augmentation 455 can be accomplished using OOD augmentation techniques to combine OOD utterances in various contexts with the original utterances of data assets 445. The OOD expansion technique may include four operations, which generally include: (i) generating a dataset containing multiple OOD examples; (ii) filtering out OOD examples whose contexts are too similar to that of the original utterance; and (iii) feeding OOD examples to the model during training in a batch process, starting with batches containing easier OOD examples and progressing to batches containing more difficult OOD examples, in order to balance between OOD examples and in-domain examples, since the number of OOD examples may be much larger compared to in-domain utterances.

[0100] In some cases, further augmentation (through OOD augmentation) may be applied to the data assets 445. For example, easy data augmentation (EDA) techniques may be used to improve the performance of text classification tasks. EDA includes four operations that help prevent overfitting and train more robust models: synonym replacement, random insertion, random swap, and random deletion. Note that in contrast to OOD augmentation, EDA operations generally (i) take words from the original text and (ii) incorporate these words into each data asset 445 relative to the original text. For example, a synonym replacement operation includes randomly selecting n words that are not stop words from the original sentence (e.g., utterance) and replacing each of these words with one of its randomly selected synonyms. A random insertion operation includes finding random synonyms of random words that are not stop words in the original sentence n times and inserting the synonyms into random positions in the sentence. A random swap operation includes randomly selecting two words in the sentence and swapping their positions n times. The random deletion operation involves randomly removing each word in the sentence with probability p.

[0101] In various embodiments, feature engineering 435 includes using an encoding model, such as the Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder (MUSE), to convert data assets 445 into feature vectors and / or to create new features created using data assets 445. An encoding model is a model that can map natural language elements such as sentences, words, and n-grams (a collection of n characters / words) to sequences of numbers. In this way, each natural language element can be represented as a single point in the vector space. The goal is to obtain a representation of sentences, words, and n-grams that a computing device can use for data processing without losing too much information. The feature vectors can include count vectors as features, term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) vectors such as word level, n-gram level, or character level as features, word embeddings as features, text / NLP as features, topic models as features, or combinations thereof. A count vector is a matrix representation of a data asset 445, where each row represents an utterance, each column represents a term from the utterance, and each cell represents the frequency count of a particular term in the utterance. TF-IDF scores represent the relative importance of a term in the utterance. Word embedding is a form of representing words and utterances using dense vector representations. The location of a word in the vector space is learned from the text and is based on the words that surround it when used. Text / NLP-based features may include the number of words in the utterance, the number of characters in the utterance, the average word density, the number of punctuation marks, the number of capital letters, the number of lemmas, the frequency distribution of part-of-speech tags (e.g., nouns and verbs), or any combination thereof. Topic modeling is a technique to identify groups of words (called topics) from a collection of utterances that contain the best information.

[0102] In various embodiments, model training 440 includes training the predictive model 425 using the feature vectors created in feature engineering 435 and / or sentence embeddings with new features. In some cases, the training process includes iterative operations to find a set of parameters for the predictive model 425 that minimizes a loss or error function of the predictive model 425. Each iteration may include finding a set of parameters for the predictive model 425 such that the value of the loss or error function using the set of parameters is less than the value of the loss or error function using another set of parameters in a previous iteration. The loss or error function may be constructed to measure the difference between the predicted output using the predictive model 425 and the labels 450 included in the data assets 445. Once a set of parameters is identified, the predictive model 425 is trained and can be utilized for prediction as designed.

[0103] In addition to the data assets 445, labels 450, feature vectors, and / or new features, other techniques and information can be utilized to refine the training process of the predictive model 425. For example, feature vectors and / or new features can be combined to help improve the accuracy of the classifier or model. Additionally or alternatively, hyperparameters can be adjusted or optimized, e.g., multiple parameters such as tree length, leaf, network parameters, etc., can be fine-tuned to obtain a best-fit model. Although the training mechanisms described herein are primarily focused on training the predictive model 425, these training mechanisms can also be utilized to fine-tune an existing predictive model 425 trained from other data assets. For example, in some cases, the predictive model 425 may have been pre-trained using utterances specific to another skill bot. In such cases, the predictive model 425 can be retrained using the data assets 445 (e.g., by OOD extension).

[0104] The prediction model training stage 410 outputs a trained prediction model 425 including a task prediction model 460 and an intent prediction model 465. The task prediction model 460 may be used in the skillbot invocation stage 415 to determine (470) the likelihood that an utterance represents a task that a particular skillbot is configured to perform, and the intent prediction model 465 may be used in the intent prediction stage 420 to classify (475) the utterance as one or more intents. In some cases, the skillbot invocation stage 415 and the intent prediction stage 420 may proceed independently to separate models in some examples. For example, the trained intent prediction model 465 may be used in the intent prediction stage 420 to predict the intent of the skillbot without first identifying the skillbot in the skillbot invocation stage 415. Similarly, the task prediction model 460 may be used in the skillbot invocation stage 415 to predict the task or skillbot to be used in the utterance without identifying the intent of the utterance in the intent prediction stage 420.

[0105] Alternatively, the skillbot invocation stage 415 and the intent prediction stage 420 may be performed sequentially, with one stage using the output of the other stage as input, or one stage being invoked in a manner specific to a particular skillbot based on the output of the other stage. For example, for a given text data 405, a skillbot invoker can invoke a skillbot via an implicit invocation using the skillbot invocation stage 415 and the task prediction model 460. The task prediction model 460 can be trained using machine learning and / or rule-based training techniques to determine the likelihood that an utterance represents a task that a particular skillbot 470 is configured to perform. Then, for an identified or invoked skillbot and a given text data 405, the intent prediction stage 420 and the intent prediction model 465 can be used to match a received utterance (e.g., an utterance in a given data asset 445) with an intent 475 associated with the skillbot. As described herein, a skillbot may be composed of one or more intents, each of which includes at least one example utterance associated with the intent and used to train a classifier. In some embodiments, the skillbot invocation stage 415 and the task prediction model 460 used in the masterbot system are trained to determine the confidence scores of individual skillbots and the confidence scores of system intents. Similarly, the intent prediction stage 420 and the intent prediction model 465 may be trained to determine the confidence scores of each intent associated with the skillbot system. The classification performed by the skillbot invocation stage 415 and the task prediction model 460 is at the bot level, whereas the classification performed by the intent prediction stage 420 and the intent prediction model 465 is at the intent level, and therefore more fine-grained.

[0106] 5 is a block diagram illustrating aspects of a model architecture 500 that provides a clustering-based approach and a metrics-based approach for computing a probability as to whether an utterance belongs to a target domain (e.g., the skill bot invocation stage 415 described with reference to FIG. 4). The model architecture 500 includes a clustering component 505, a classification component 510, and an ensemble component 515. The clustering component 505 includes two stages: (i) an unsupervised clustering model 520 and (ii) an outlier detection model 525. The unsupervised clustering model 520 is shared between the clustering-based approach and the metrics-based approach to find (530) clusters in the in-domain data 535, compute (540) centroids, and generate (545) embedding representations for the clusters. The outlier detection model 525 is built with a distance or density algorithm (e.g., Z-score, K-means, DBSCAN, local outlier detection (LOF), isolation forest, etc.) to provide a probability 550 (e.g., a second probability) as to whether the input utterance 555 belongs to the target domain or not. The classification component 510 comprises two stages: (i) an unsupervised clustering model 520 and (ii) a distance learning model 560. The distance learning model 560 is built with a deep learning network 575 having trained model parameters configured to calculate an absolute difference 565 between a sentence embedding 570 for the input utterance 555 and an embedding representation for the cluster 545, and provide a probability 580 (e.g., a first probability) as to whether the input utterance 555 belongs to the target domain or not. The ensemble component 515 is configured to evaluate the probabilities 580 and 550 to arrive at a final probability 585 as to whether the input utterance 555 belongs to the target domain or not, and based on the final probability 585, classify the input utterance 555 as being in-domain or out-of-domain for the chatbot.

[0107] With respect to the clustering-based approach performed by the clustering component 505, the in-domain data 535 used to train the unsupervised clustering algorithm comprises in-domain utterances associated with a particular domain or skill bot (e.g., only pizza ordering training data). An embedding model 590 (e.g., MUSE) may be used to generate sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance by mapping natural language elements, including sentences, words, and n-grams, to sequences of numbers. Each of the natural language elements is represented as a single point in a vector space. Thus, each sentence embedding is a vector of values ​​that represent the natural language element. An unsupervised clustering algorithm (e.g., K-means, affinity propagation, agglomerative clustering, balanced iterative shrinkage and clustering (BIRCH), DBSCAN, mean shift, ordering points to identify clustering structures (OPTICS), etc.) takes the data points (i.e., sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance) as input and groups them into clusters. This grouping process is the training phase of the unsupervised clustering algorithm. The result will be an unsupervised clustering model 520 that takes as input a data sample (e.g., a sentence embedding for a new in-domain utterance) and returns the cluster to which the new data point belongs according to the training it has undergone. Once clusters have been found for the in-domain data 535, an embedding 545 is generated for each cluster. The embedding 545 is the average of the sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance in the cluster. The clustering process narrows the in-domain data 535 down to a more manageable size of embeddings 545 for the cluster (e.g., 1000 or fewer embeddings, 500 or fewer embeddings, or 250 or fewer embeddings).

[0108] The outlier detection model 525 optionally comprises an unsupervised clustering algorithm (e.g., K-means, affinity propagation, agglomerative clustering, BIRCH, DBSCAN, mean shift, OPTICS, etc.) that takes as input the data points (i.e., the embedding representations 545 and the centroid calculations for the clusters determined by the centroid calculation 535 and cluster detection 530) and further groups them into refined clusters. This grouping process is the training phase of the unsupervised clustering algorithm. The result will be an unsupervised clustering model that takes as input the data samples (e.g., the embedding representations and the centroid calculations for the clusters) and returns the refined cluster to which the new data point belongs according to the training that the unsupervised clustering model has undergone. Once the refined clusters are determined for the embedding representations 545, a refined embedding representation is generated for each refined cluster. This refined embedding representation is the average of the embedding representations 545 for each refined cluster. The outlier detection model 525 comprises a distance or density algorithm (e.g., Z-score, K-means, DBSCAN, local outlier detection (LOF), isolation forest, etc.) configured to determine a distance or density deviation between the sentence embedding 570 for the input utterance 555 and the embedding representations (or refined embedding representations) for the neighboring clusters. The outlier detection model 525 predicts a probability 525 as to whether the input utterance 555 belongs to the target domain or not based on the determined distance or density deviation. For example, the outlier detection model 525 may consider an input utterance 555 having a significant distance from or a substantially lower density than any neighboring cluster to be an outlier, and may then use the outlier to provide a probability 525 as to whether the input utterance 555 belongs to the target domain or not.

[0109] With respect to the metrics-based approach performed by the classification component 510, the deep learning network 575 may be trained using a set of training data including (i) sentence embeddings for the input utterance, (ii) an embedding representation for each cluster composed of sentence embeddings for the in-domain data, and (iii) an absolute difference between the sentence embeddings for the input utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster composed of sentence embeddings for the in-domain data. The in-domain data 535 used to train the deep learning network 575 comprises in-domain utterances associated with various domains or skill bots (e.g., pizza ordering training data, but also training data from other available domains or bots such as payroll bots, weather bots, bank account bots, etc.).

[0110] In some embodiments, the deep learning network 575 is a stacked highway network with a nonlinear transformation as part of the gating function. Model parameters for the stacked highway network may be learned using a set of training data. During training of the metric learning model 560 with the set of training data, the high-dimensional features of the sentence embeddings and the embedding representations for each cluster are converted to low-dimensional vectors, which are then concatenated with features from the in-domain utterances and fed into a hidden layer of a deep neural network, where the values ​​of the low-dimensional vectors are randomly initialized and, together with the model parameters, are learned to minimize the loss function.

[0111] Once trained, the stacked highway network can determine the similarities or differences between sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 555 and each embedded representation 545 for each cluster. An embedding model 595 (e.g., MUSE) can be used to generate sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 555 by mapping natural language elements, including sentences, words, and n-grams, to sequences of numbers. Each of the natural language elements is represented as a single point in the vector space. Thus, a sentence embedding is a vector of values ​​that represent the natural language elements.

[0112] The layered highway network can be formulated as follows:

[0113]

number

[0114] The similarity or difference between the sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 555 and each embedded representation 545 for each cluster may be determined by (i) calculating the absolute difference 565 between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster, (ii) inputting the absolute differences 565, the sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance and each embedded representation 545 for each cluster into a stacked highway network, and (iii) using the stacked highway network, the absolute differences 565, the sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 555 and the embedded representations 545 for each cluster to determine the similarity or difference between the sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 555 and each embedded representation 545 for each cluster. 5, the absolute difference between the sentence embedding 570 for the input utterance 555 and each embedding representation 545 for each cluster is calculated by taking the absolute value of the difference (e.g., |UV|=[0.2,0.3,0.9]|) between the vector value of the sentence embedding 570 for the input utterance 555 (e.g., V=[0.1,0.4,-0.5]) and the vector value of each embedding representation 545 for each cluster composed of sentence embeddings for the intra-domain data 535 (e.g., U=[0.3,0.1,0.4]). A probability 580 as to whether the input utterance 555 belongs to the target domain or not can be predicted by the stacked highway network based on the determined similarity or difference between the sentence embedding 570 for the input utterance 555 and each embedding representation 545 for each cluster.

[0115] In another embodiment, the deep learning network 575 is a wide-and-deep learning network having a linear model and a deep neural network. The linear model comprises model parameters trained using a set of training data. The set of training data includes absolute differences between sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster for in-domain utterances from multiple domains. During training of the linear model with the set of training data, a linear relationship between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster is learned using a hypothesis function. During learning of the linear relationship, the multiple model parameters are learned to minimize a loss function. The deep learning network comprises model parameters trained using a set of training data. The set of training data includes sentence embeddings for in-domain utterances from multiple domains. During training of the deep learning network with a set of training data, the high-dimensional features of the sentence embeddings for the in-domain utterances are converted into low-dimensional vectors, which are then concatenated with features from the in-domain utterances and fed into a hidden layer of a deep neural network, where the values ​​of the low-dimensional vectors are randomly initialized and trained to minimize a loss function along with multiple model parameters.

[0116] Once trained, the Wide and Deep Learning Network can determine similarities or differences between sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 555 and each embedded representation 545 for each cluster. An embedding model 595 (e.g., MUSE) can be used to generate sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 555 by mapping natural language elements, including sentences, words, and n-grams, to sequences of numbers. Each of the natural language elements is represented as a single point in the vector space. Thus, a sentence embedding is a vector of values ​​that represent the natural language elements.

[0117] Determining the similarity or difference between the sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 555 and each embedded representation 545 for each cluster may comprise (i) calculating an absolute difference 565 between the sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 555 and each embedded representation 545 for each cluster; (ii) inputting the absolute differences 565, the sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 565, and the embedded representations 545 for each cluster into a wide-and-deep learning network; (iii) predicting a wide-based probability of whether the input utterance 555 belongs to the target domain using the linear model and the absolute differences 565; and (iv) determining the similarity or difference between the sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 555 and each embedded representation 545 for each cluster using the deep neural network, the sentence embeddings 570 for the input utterance 555, and the embedded representations 545 for each cluster. The probability 580 of whether the input utterance 555 belongs to the target domain or not can be predicted using the final layer of the wide-and-deep learning network by evaluating the wide probability and the similarity or difference between the sentence embedding 570 for the input utterance 555 and each embedding representation 545 for each cluster.

[0118] The ensemble component 515 evaluates the probabilities 580 and 550 to arrive at a final probability 585 on whether the input utterance 555 belongs to the target domain or not, and classifies the input utterance 555 as in-domain or out-of-domain for the chatbot based on the final probability 585. In a particular case, the ensemble component 515 utilizes the following in_domain_prob function (in_domain_prob(ensemble,x) = max(in_domain_prob(cluster-based,x),in_domain_prob(metric-based,x)), which returns the in-domain probability of utterance x taking into account the clustering-based approach and the metric-based approach. Essentially, the utterance is in the target domain if either approach says x is in-domain, and the utterance is out-of-domain if both approaches say x is out-of-domain (the error on the side of utterance x is in-domain).

[0119] Technology for OOD Decisions FIG. 6 is a flow chart illustrating a process 600 for identifying OOD utterances, according to certain embodiments. The process illustrated in FIG. 6 may be implemented in software (e.g., code, instructions, programs) executed by one or more processing units (e.g., processors, cores) of the respective systems, in hardware, or a combination thereof. The software may be stored in a non-transitory storage medium (e.g., in a memory device). The method illustrated in FIG. 6 and described below is intended to be exemplary and non-limiting. Although FIG. 6 illustrates various processing steps occurring in a particular sequence or order, this is not intended to be limiting. In certain alternative embodiments, these steps may be performed in a different order, or some steps may be performed in parallel. In certain embodiments, such as those illustrated in FIGS. 1-5, the process illustrated in FIG. 6 may be performed by a trained model architecture (e.g., model architecture 500) for identifying OOD utterances.

[0120] At 605, an utterance and a target domain for the chatbot are received (e.g., a skill or chatbot as described with reference to Figures 1, 2 and 3). The target domain is defined for a chatbot specialized in a particular type of task, such as tracking inventory, submitting time cards and creating expense reports.

[0121] At 610, a sentence embedding is generated for the utterance. The sentence embedding for the utterance may be generated using an embedding model that maps natural language elements, including sentences, words, and n-grams, to sequences of numbers. Each natural language element is represented as a single point in the vector space. Thus, each sentence embedding is a vector of values ​​that represent the natural language element.

[0122] At 615, an embedding representation is obtained for each cluster of a plurality of clusters of in-domain utterances associated with the target domain. The embedding representation for each cluster is an average of sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance in the cluster. Obtaining an embedding representation for each cluster may comprise obtaining in-domain utterances based on the target domain (e.g., if the target domain is ordering pizza, then all of the in-domain utterances relate to utterances associated with ordering pizza, such as "I want to order cheese pizza"), generating sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance, inputting the sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance into an unsupervised clustering model configured to interpret the in-domain utterances to identify a plurality of clusters in a feature space of the in-domain utterances, classifying the sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance into one of a plurality of clusters based on similarities or differences between features of the sentence embeddings and features of the sentence embeddings in each cluster, calculating a centroid for each cluster of the plurality of clusters, and outputting the embedding representations and the centroids for each cluster of the plurality of clusters. The unsupervised clustering model may be K-means, affinity propagation, agglomerative clustering, BIRCH, DBSCAN, mean shift, OPTICS, etc.

[0123] A sentence embedding for each in-domain utterance can be generated using an embedding model that maps natural language elements, including sentences, words, and n-grams, to sequences of numbers. Each natural language element is represented as a single point in the vector space. Thus, each sentence embedding is a vector of values ​​that represent the natural language elements.

[0124] At 620, the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedding representations for each cluster are input into a distance learning model, the distance learning model having trained model parameters configured to provide a first probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain. At 625, the distance learning model is used to determine similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster. At 630, the distance learning model is used to predict a first probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain based on the determined similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster.

[0125] In some embodiments, the metric learning model comprises a stacked highway network with a nonlinear transformation as part of the gating function. Determining the similarity or difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster may comprise (i) calculating an absolute difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster, (ii) inputting the absolute difference, the sentence embedding for the utterance and the embedded representation for each cluster into a stacked highway network, and (iii) using the stacked highway network, the absolute difference, the sentence embedding for the utterance and the embedded representation for each cluster to determine the similarity or difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster.

[0126] Model parameters for the stacked highway network may be learned using a set of training data that includes (i) sentence embeddings for the utterance, (ii) an embedding representation for each cluster composed of sentence embeddings for in-domain utterances from multiple domains, and (iii) an absolute difference between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster composed of sentence embeddings for the in-domain utterances. During training of the metric learning model with the set of training data, high-dimensional features of the sentence embeddings and the embedding representation for each cluster are converted to low-dimensional vectors, which are then concatenated with features from the in-domain utterances and fed into a hidden layer of a deep neural network, where the values ​​of the low-dimensional vectors are randomly initialized and, together with the model parameters, are learned to minimize a loss function.

[0127] In another embodiment, the metric learning model comprises a wide-and-deep learning network having a linear model and a deep neural network. Determining the similarity or difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster may comprise: (i) calculating an absolute difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster; (ii) inputting the absolute difference, the sentence embedding for the utterance and the embedded representation for each cluster into the wide-and-deep learning network; (iii) predicting a wide-based probability of whether the utterance belongs to the target domain using the linear model and the absolute difference; and (iv) determining the similarity or difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster using the deep neural network, the sentence embedding for the utterance and the embedded representation for each cluster. Predicting the first probability comprises evaluating the similarity or difference between the wide probability and the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster using a final layer of the wide-and-deep learning network.

[0128] The linear model comprises model parameters trained using a set of training data. The set of training data includes absolute differences between sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster for in-domain utterances from a plurality of domains. During training of the linear model with the set of training data, a linear relationship between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster is learned using a hypothesis function. During learning of the linear relationship, the plurality of model parameters are learned to minimize a loss function.

[0129] The deep learning network comprises model parameters trained using a set of training data, the set of training data including sentence embeddings for in-domain utterances from a plurality of domains. During training of the deep learning network with the set of training data, high-dimensional features of the sentence embeddings for the in-domain utterances are converted into low-dimensional vectors, which are then concatenated with features from the in-domain utterances and fed into a hidden layer of the deep neural network, where the values ​​of the low-dimensional vectors are randomly initialized and trained to minimize a loss function along with a plurality of model parameters.

[0130] At 635, the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedding representations for each cluster are input into an outlier detection model that is built with a distance or density algorithm for outlier detection, which may be Z-score, K-means, DBSCAN, local outlier detection (LOF), isolation forest, etc.

[0131] At 640, the outlier detection model is used to determine a distance or density deviation between the sentence embedding for the utterance and the embedding representations for the adjacent clusters. At 645, the outlier detection model is used to predict a second probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain based on the determined distance or density deviation. The prediction may comprise calculating a z-score for the utterance based on the distance or density deviation between the sentence embedding for the utterance and the embedding representations for the adjacent clusters, and determining the second probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain by applying a sigmoid function to the z-score.

[0132] At 650, the first probability and the second probability are evaluated to determine a final probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain or not. At 655, based on the final probability, the utterance is classified as in-domain or out-domain for the chatbot. The probabilities calculated from the clustering-based approach and the distance-based approach are combined as an ensemble approach to get the best from both the clustering-based approach and the distance-based approach. In a particular case, the ensemble approach comprises (in_domain_prob(ensemble,x) = max(in_domain_prob(cluster-based,x),in_domain_prob(metric-based,x)), where the in_domain_prob function returns the in-domain probability of utterance x taking into account the clustering-based approach and the metric-based approach. Essentially, the utterance is in the target domain if either approach says x is in-domain, and the utterance is out-of-domain if both approaches say x is out-of-domain (the error on the side of utterance x is in-domain).

[0133] Exemplary System 7 is a simplified diagram of a distributed system 700. In the illustrated example, the distributed system 700 includes one or more client computing devices 702, 704, 706, and 708, which are coupled to a server 712 via one or more communication networks 710. The client computing devices 702, 704, 706, and 708 may be configured to execute one or more applications.

[0134] In various examples, the server 712 may be adapted to execute one or more services or software applications that enable one or more embodiments described in this disclosure. In certain examples, the server 712 may also provide other services or software applications, which may include non-virtual and virtual environments. In some examples, these services may be provided to users of the client computing devices 702, 704, 706 and / or 708 as web-based or cloud services, such as under a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Users operating the client computing devices 702, 704, 706 and / or 708 may then utilize one or more client applications to interact with the server 712 to utilize the services provided by these components.

[0135] In the configuration shown in Figure 7, server 712 may include one or more components 718, 720, and 722 that implement the functions performed by server 712. These components may include software components, hardware components, or a combination thereof that may be executed by one or more processors. It should be understood that a variety of different system configurations are possible that may differ from distributed system 700. The example shown in Figure 7 is thus one example of a distributed system for implementing an exemplary system and is not intended to be limiting.

[0136] A user may use client computing devices 702, 704, 706 and / or 708 to execute one or more applications, models or chatbots that may generate one or more events or models that may be executed or provided according to the teachings of this disclosure. The client devices may provide an interface that allows a user of the client device to interact with the client device. The client devices may also output information to the user via the interface. Although FIG. 7 shows only four client computing devices, any number of client computing devices may be supported.

[0137] Client devices may include various types of computing systems, such as portable handheld devices, general purpose computers (such as personal computers and laptops), workstation computers, wearable devices, gaming systems, thin clients, various messaging devices, sensors or other sensing devices, etc. These computing devices may run various types and versions of software applications and operating systems (e.g., Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, UNIX or UNIX-like operating systems, Linux or Linux-like operating systems (such as Google Chrome™ OS)), including various mobile operating systems (e.g., Microsoft Windows Mobile, iOS, Windows Phone, Android, Blackberry, Palm OS). Portable handheld devices may include mobile phones, smartphones (e.g., iPhone), tablets (e.g., iPad), personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc. Wearable devices may include Google Glass head-mounted displays and other devices. The gaming systems may include various handheld gaming devices, Internet-enabled gaming devices (e.g., Microsoft Xbox® game consoles with or without Kinect® gesture input devices, Sony PlayStation® systems, various gaming systems offered by Nintendo®, etc.), etc. The client devices may be capable of running a variety of different applications, such as various Internet-related apps, communication applications (e.g., email applications, Short Message Service (SMS) applications), etc., and may use a variety of communication protocols.

[0138] Network 710 may be any type of network familiar to those skilled in the art capable of supporting data communications using any of a variety of available protocols, including but not limited to TCP / IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol), SNA (Systems Network Architecture), IPX (Internet Packet Exchange), AppleTalk, etc. By way of example only, network 710 may be a local area network (LAN), an Ethernet-based network, a token ring, a wide area network (WAN), the Internet, a virtual network, a virtual private network (VPN), an intranet, an extranet, a public switched telephone network (PSTN), an infrared network, a wireless network (e.g., a network operating under any of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1002.11 suite of protocols, Bluetooth, and / or other wireless protocols), and / or any combination of these and / or other networks.

[0139] The servers 712 may be comprised of one or more general purpose computers, specialized server computers (including, by way of example, PC (personal computer) servers, UNIX servers, mid-range servers, mainframe computers, rack-mounted servers, etc.), server farms, server clusters, or other suitable configurations and / or combinations. The servers 712 may include one or more virtual machines running a virtual operating system, or other computing architectures that include virtualization, such as one or more flexible pools of logical storage devices that may be virtualized to maintain virtual storage devices for the servers. In various examples, the servers 712 may be adapted to run one or more services or software applications that provide the functionality described in the foregoing disclosure.

[0140] The computing systems in the servers 712 may run one or more operating systems, including any of those mentioned above, and any commercially available server operating system. The servers 712 may also run any of a variety of other server and / or mid-tier applications, including HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) servers, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) servers, CGI (Common Gateway Interface) servers, JAVA servers, database servers, and the like. Exemplary database servers include, but are not limited to, those commercially available from Oracle Corporation®, Microsoft Corporation®, Sybase®, IBM® (International Business Machines), and the like.

[0141] In some implementations, server 712 may include one or more applications for parsing and consolidating data feeds and / or event updates received from users of client computing devices 702, 704, 706, and 708. By way of example, the data feeds and / or event updates may include, but are not limited to, Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, or real-time updates received from one or more third party information sources and continuous data streams, which may include real-time events related to sensor data applications, financial stock ticker boards, network performance measurement tools (e.g., network monitoring and traffic management applications), clickstream analysis tools, automobile traffic monitoring, and the like. Server 712 may also include one or more applications for displaying the data feeds and / or real-time events via one or more display devices of client computing devices 702, 704, 706, and 708.

[0142] The distributed system 700 may also include one or more data repositories 714, 716. In certain examples, these data repositories may be used to store data and other information. For example, one or more of the data repositories 714, 716 may be used to store information such as information related to the chatbot's performance or generated models used by the chatbot that are used by the server 712 in performing various functions according to various embodiments. The data repositories 714, 716 may be in various locations. For example, the data repository used by the server 712 may be local to the server 712 or may be remote from the server 712 and communicate with the server 712 via a network-based or dedicated connection. The data repositories 714, 716 may be of different types. In certain examples, the data repository used by the server 712 may be a database, such as a relational database, such as databases provided by Oracle Corporation and other vendors. One or more of these databases may be adapted to allow data to be stored, updated, and retrieved from the database in response to SQL-formatted commands.

[0143] In certain examples, one or more of the data repositories 714, 716 may also be used by an application to store application data. The data repositories used by an application may be of different types, such as, for example, a key-value store repository, an object store repository, or a general storage repository supported by a file system.

[0144] In certain examples, the functionality described in this disclosure may be provided as a service via a cloud environment. FIG. 8 is a simplified block diagram of a cloud-based system environment in which various services may be provided as cloud services, according to certain examples. In the example shown in FIG. 8, a cloud infrastructure system 802 may provide one or more cloud services that may be requested by users using one or more client computing devices 804, 806, and 808. The cloud infrastructure system 802 may comprise one or more computers and / or servers, which may include those described above for server 812. The computers in the cloud infrastructure system 802 may be organized as general purpose computers, specialized server computers, server farms, server clusters, or other suitable configurations and / or combinations.

[0145] The network 810 may facilitate the communication and exchange of data between the clients 804, 806, and 808 and the cloud infrastructure system 802. The network 810 may include one or more networks. These networks may be of the same type or different types. The network 810 may support one or more communication protocols, including wired and / or wireless protocols, to facilitate communication.

[0146] The example shown in Figure 8 is merely one example of a cloud infrastructure system and is not intended to be limiting. It should be understood that in some other examples, cloud infrastructure system 802 may have more or fewer components than those shown in Figure 8, may combine two or more components, or may have a different configuration or arrangement of components. For example, while Figure 8 shows three client computing devices, any number of client computing devices may be supported in alternative examples.

[0147] The term cloud services is generally used to refer to services made available to users on demand over a communications network such as the Internet by a service provider's system (e.g., cloud infrastructure system 802). Generally, in a public cloud environment, the servers and systems that make up the cloud service provider's system are distinct from the customer's own on-premise servers and systems. The cloud service provider's systems are managed by the cloud service provider. Thus, customers can utilize these services without having to purchase separate licenses, support, or hardware and software resources for the cloud services provided by the cloud service provider. For example, the cloud service provider's system may host an application, and users can order and use this application on demand over the Internet without having to purchase infrastructure resources to run this application. Cloud services are designed to provide easy and scalable access to applications, resources, and services. Several providers offer cloud services. For example, several cloud services, such as middleware services, database services, and Java cloud services, are offered by Oracle Corporation of Redwood Shores, California.

[0148] In particular examples, cloud infrastructure system 802 may provide one or more cloud services using various models, such as under a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, including a hybrid service model, etc. Cloud infrastructure system 802 may include a set of applications, middleware, databases, and other resources that enable the delivery of the various cloud services.

[0149] The SaaS model allows applications or software to be provided to customers as a service over a communications network such as the Internet, without the customer having to purchase hardware or software for the underlying application. For example, the SaaS model may be used to provide customers with access to on-demand applications hosted by cloud infrastructure system 802. Examples of SaaS services offered by Oracle Corporation include, but are not limited to, various services for human capital / capital management, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), enterprise performance management (EPM), analytics services, social applications, and the like.

[0150] The IaaS model is commonly used to provide infrastructure resources (e.g., servers, storage, hardware and networking resources) as cloud services to customers to provide elastic compute and storage capabilities. Various IaaS services are offered by Oracle Corporation.

[0151] The PaaS model is commonly used to provide platform and environment resources as a service that allows customers to develop, run and manage applications and services without the need for customers to procure, build or maintain such resources. Examples of PaaS services provided by Oracle Corporation (registered trademark) include, but are not limited to, Oracle Java Cloud Services (JCS), Oracle Database Cloud Services (DBCS), data management cloud services, various application development solution services, etc.

[0152] Cloud services are generally provided in an on-demand self-service based, subscription based, elastically scalable, reliable, highly available, and secure manner. For example, a customer may order one or more services provided by cloud infrastructure system 802 via a subscription order. Cloud infrastructure system 802 then executes processing to provide the services requested in the customer's subscription order. For example, a user may use an utterance to request the cloud infrastructure system to take a particular action (e.g., intent) as described above and / or to provide a service to a chatbot system as described herein. Cloud infrastructure system 802 may be configured to provide one or more cloud services.

[0153] Cloud infrastructure system 802 may provide cloud services through a variety of deployment models. In a public cloud model, cloud infrastructure system 802 may be owned by a third-party cloud service provider and cloud services are offered to any public customer, which may be an individual or a business. In certain other examples, under a private cloud model, cloud infrastructure system 802 may be operated within an organization (e.g., within a corporate organization) and services are provided to customers within the organization. For example, the customers may be various departments of a company, such as human resources, payroll, or may be individuals within the company. In certain other examples, under a community cloud model, cloud infrastructure system 802 and the services provided may be shared by several organizations within an associated community. Various other models, such as hybrids of the above models, may also be used.

[0154] Client computing devices 804, 806, and 808 can be of different types (such as client computing devices 702, 704, 706, and 708 shown in FIG. 7) and may be capable of running one or more client applications. A user can interact with the cloud infrastructure system 802, such as by using a client device to request services provided by the cloud infrastructure system 802. For example, a user can use a client device to request information or actions from a chatbot as described in this disclosure.

[0155] In some examples, the processes executed by the cloud infrastructure system 802 to provide services can include model training and deployment. This analysis can include using, analyzing, and manipulating a dataset to train and deploy one or more models. This analysis can be executed by one or more processors that may, in some cases, process data in parallel or perform simulations using the data. For example, big data analysis can be executed by the cloud infrastructure system 802 to generate and train one or more models for a chatbot system. The data used in this analysis can include structured data (such as data stored in a database or data structured according to a structured model) and / or unstructured data (such as data blobs (binary large objects)).

[0156] 8, cloud infrastructure system 802 may include infrastructure resources 830 utilized to facilitate the provision of various cloud services offered by cloud infrastructure system 802. Infrastructure resources 830 may include, for example, processing resources, storage or memory resources, networking resources, etc. In a particular example, storage virtual machines available to provide storage requested by applications may be part of cloud infrastructure system 802. In other examples, storage virtual machines may be part of a different system.

[0157] In certain examples, to facilitate efficient provisioning of these resources to support various cloud services offered by cloud infrastructure system 802 to various customers, resources may be bundled into a set of resources or resource modules (also referred to as "pods"). Each resource module or pod may comprise a pre-integrated and optimized combination of one or more types of resources. In certain examples, different pods may be pre-provisioned for different types of cloud services. For example, a first set of pods may be provisioned for database services, a second set of pods, which may include a different combination of resources than the pods in the first set of pods, may be provisioned for Java services, etc. In some services, resources allocated for provisioning of a service may be shared between services.

[0158] Cloud infrastructure system 802 itself may use services 832 internally that are shared by various components of cloud infrastructure system 802 to facilitate provisioning of services by cloud infrastructure system 802. These internal shared services may include, but are not limited to, security and identity services, integration services, enterprise repository services, enterprise manager services, virus scanning and whitelist services, high availability, backup and recovery services, services to enable cloud support, email services, notification services, file transfer services, etc.

[0159] Cloud infrastructure system 802 may comprise multiple subsystems. These subsystems may be implemented in software, hardware, or a combination thereof. As shown in FIG. 8, these subsystems may include a user interface subsystem 812 that allows a user or customer of cloud infrastructure system 802 to interact with cloud infrastructure system 802. User interface subsystem 812 may include a variety of different interfaces, such as a web interface 814, an online store interface 816 (wherein cloud services offered by cloud infrastructure system 802 are advertised and available for purchase by consumers), and other interfaces 818. For example, a customer may use a client device to request one or more services offered by cloud infrastructure system 802 using one or more of interfaces 814, 816, and 818 (service request 834). For example, a customer may access an online store to browse cloud services offered by cloud infrastructure system 802 and place a subscription order for one or more services offered by cloud infrastructure system 802 for which the customer wishes to subscribe. The service request may include information identifying the customer and the one or more services for which the customer wishes to subscribe. For example, a customer may place a subscription order for services provided by cloud infrastructure system 802. As part of the order, the customer may provide information identifying the chatbot system for which the services are to be provided, and optionally, one or more credentials for that chatbot system.

[0160] 8, cloud infrastructure system 802 may include an order management subsystem (OMS) 820 configured to process new orders. As part of this processing, OMS 820 may be configured to create an account for the customer if not already done so, receive billing and / or billing information from the customer that is used to issue a bill to the customer for providing the customer with the requested services, verify the customer information, finalize the customer's order upon verification, and orchestrate various workflows to prepare the order for provisioning.

[0161] Upon proper authentication, OMS 820 may then invoke Order Provisioning Subsystem (OPS) 824. OPS 824 is configured to provision resources for the order, including processing, memory, and networking resources. Provisioning may include allocating resources for the order and configuring these resources to facilitate the service requested by the customer order. The manner of provisioning resources for the order and the type of resources provisioned may depend on the type of cloud service ordered by the customer. For example, according to one workflow, OPS 824 may be configured to determine that a particular cloud service is being requested and identify the number of pods that would have been pre-configured for that particular cloud service. The number of pods allocated to the order may depend on the size / amount / level / scope of the requested service. For example, the number of pods allocated may be determined based on the number of users supported by the service, the period for which the service is being requested, etc. The allocated pods may then be customized to the particular requesting customer to provide the requested service.

[0162] In certain examples, the above setup phase processing may be performed by cloud infrastructure system 802 as part of a provisioning process. Cloud infrastructure system 802 may generate an application ID and select a storage virtual machine for the application from among the storage virtual machines provided by cloud infrastructure system 802 itself or from storage virtual machines provided by other systems other than cloud infrastructure system 802.

[0163] Cloud infrastructure system 802 may send a response or notification 844 to the requesting customer indicating when the requested service will be ready for use. In some instances, information (e.g., a link) may be sent to the customer that enables the customer to begin using and taking advantage of the benefits of the requested service. In a particular example, when a customer requests a service, the response may include a chatbot system ID generated by cloud infrastructure system 802 and information identifying the chatbot system selected by cloud infrastructure system 802 that corresponds to the chatbot system ID.

[0164] Cloud infrastructure system 802 may provide services to multiple customers. For each customer, cloud infrastructure system 802 is responsible for managing information related to one or more subscription orders received from the customer, maintaining customer data related to these orders, and providing the requested services to the customer. Cloud infrastructure system 802 may also collect usage statistics regarding the customer's use of the subscribed services. For example, statistics may be collected on the amount of storage used, the amount of data transferred, the number of users, and system up and down times, etc. This usage information may be used to bill the customer. Billing may occur on a monthly cycle, for example.

[0165] Cloud infrastructure system 802 may provide services to multiple customers in parallel. Cloud infrastructure system 802 may store information of these customers, possibly including proprietary information. In a particular example, cloud infrastructure system 802 comprises an identity management subsystem (IMS) 828 configured to manage customer information and segregate the managed information such that information related to one customer is not accessible by another customer. IMS 828 may be configured to provide various security-related services, such as identity services (information access management, authentication and authorization services, services for managing customer identities and roles and related functions, etc.).

[0166] 9 is a diagram illustrating an example of a computer system 900. In some examples, the computer system 900 may be used to implement a digital assistant or chatbot system in a distributed environment, as well as any of the various servers and computer systems described above. As shown in FIG. 9, the computer system 900 includes various subsystems, including a processing subsystem 904, which communicates with several other subsystems via a bus subsystem 902. These other subsystems may include a processing acceleration unit 906, an I / O subsystem 908, a storage subsystem 918, and a communication subsystem 924. The storage subsystem 918 may include a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium, including a storage medium 922 and a system memory 910.

[0167] Bus subsystem 902 provides a mechanism for allowing the various components and subsystems of computer system 900 to communicate with one another as intended. Although bus subsystem 902 is shown diagrammatically as a single bus, alternative examples of the bus subsystem may utilize multiple buses. Bus subsystem 902 may be any of several types of bus structures including a memory bus or memory controller, a peripheral bus, a local bus, etc. using any of a variety of bus architectures. For example, such architectures may include an Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus, a MicroChannel Architecture (MCA) bus, an Enhanced ISA (EISA) bus, a Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) local bus, a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus, which may be implemented as a mezzanine bus manufactured in accordance with the IEEE P1386.1 standard, and the like.

[0168] The processing subsystem 904 controls the operation of the computer system 900 and may comprise one or more processors, application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), or field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These processors may include single-core processors or multi-core processors. The processing resources of the computer system 900 may be organized into one or more processing units 932, 934, etc. The processing units may include one or more processors, one or more cores from the same or different processors, combinations of cores and processors, or other combinations of cores and processors. In some examples, the processing subsystem 904 may include one or more special purpose co-processors, such as a graphics processor, a digital signal processor (DSP), etc. In some examples, some or all of the processing units of the processing subsystem 904 may be realized using customized circuitry, such as an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or a field programmable gate array (FPGA).

[0169] In some examples, the processing units in the processing subsystem 904 can execute instructions stored in the system memory 910 or on the computer-readable storage medium 922. In various examples, the processing units can execute various program or code instructions and can maintain multiple simultaneously executing programs or processes. At any one time, some or all of the program code being executed can be in the system memory 910 and / or on the computer-readable storage medium 922 (including, in some cases, on one or more storage devices). Through suitable programming, the processing subsystem 904 can provide the various functions described above. In instances where the computer system 900 is running one or more virtual machines, one or more processing units can be assigned to each virtual machine.

[0170] In certain examples, the processing acceleration unit 906 may be optionally provided to perform customized processing to accelerate the overall processing performed by the computer system 900 or to offload a portion of the processing performed by the processing subsystem 904.

[0171] The I / O subsystem 908 may include devices and mechanisms for inputting information into the computer system 900 and / or outputting information from or through the computer system 900. In general, use of the term input device is intended to include all possible types of devices and mechanisms for inputting information into the computer system 900. User interface input devices may include, for example, keyboards, pointing devices such as mice or trackballs, touchpads or touchscreens integrated into displays, scroll wheels, click wheels, dials, buttons, switches, keypads, voice input devices with voice command recognition systems, microphones, and other types of input devices. User interface input devices may also include motion sensing and / or gesture recognition devices such as Microsoft Kinect® motion sensors that allow a user to control and interact with the input device, Microsoft Xbox® 360 game controllers, devices that provide an interface for receiving input using gestures and verbal commands. The user interface input devices may also include eye gesture recognition devices, such as a Google Glass® blink detector, that detects eye movements from the user (e.g., "blinking" while taking a picture and / or making a menu selection) and translates the eye gestures as input to the input device (e.g., Google Glass®). Additionally, the user interface input devices may include a voice recognition sensing device that allows the user to interact with a voice recognition system (e.g., Siri® Navigator) via voice commands.

[0172] Other examples of user interface input devices include, but are not limited to, three-dimensional (3D) mice, joysticks or pointing sticks, game pads and graphic tablets, as well as audio / visual devices, such as speakers, digital cameras, digital camcorders, portable media players, webcams, image scanners, fingerprint scanners, barcode readers 3D scanners, 3D printers, laser range finders, and eye-tracking devices. Additionally, user interface input devices may include medical imaging input devices, such as, for example, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, position emission tomography, and medical ultrasound devices. User interface input devices may also include audio input devices, such as, for example, MIDI keyboards, digital musical instruments, and the like.

[0173] In general, use of the term "output device" is intended to include all possible types of devices and mechanisms for outputting information from computer system 900 to a user or to another computer. User interface output devices may include non-visual displays such as a display subsystem, indicator lights, or audio output devices. Display subsystems may be flat panel devices such as those using cathode ray tubes (CRTs), liquid crystal displays (LCDs) or plasma displays, projection devices, touch screens, and the like. For example, user interface output devices may include, but are not limited to, a variety of display devices that visually convey text, graphics, and audio / visual information, such as monitors, printers, speakers, headphones, automobile navigation systems, plotters, audio output devices, and modems.

[0174] The storage subsystem 918 provides a repository or data store for storing information and data used by the computer system 900. The storage subsystem 918 provides a tangible, non-transitory computer-readable storage medium for storing basic programming and data structures that provide some example functionality. The storage subsystem 918 may store software (e.g., programs, code modules, instructions) that, when executed by the processing subsystem 904, provide the functionality described above. This software may be executed by one or more processing units of the processing subsystem 904. The storage subsystem 918 may also provide authentication according to the teachings of the present disclosure.

[0175] The storage subsystem 918 may include one or more non-transient memory devices, including volatile and non-volatile memory devices. As shown in FIG. 9, the storage subsystem 918 includes a system memory 910 and a computer-readable storage medium 922. The system memory 910 may include several memories, including a volatile main random access memory (RAM) for storing instructions and data during program execution, and a non-volatile read-only memory (ROM) or flash memory in which fixed instructions are stored. In some implementations, a basic input / output system (BIOS), containing basic routines that help transfer information between elements within the computer system 900, such as during start-up, may typically be stored in a ROM. The RAM typically includes data and / or program modules currently being operated and executed by the processing subsystem 904. In some implementations, the system memory 910 may include several different types of memories, such as static random access memory (SRAM), dynamic random access memory (DRAM), and the like.

[0176] 9, system memory 910 may load running application programs 912 (which may include various applications such as a web browser, a mid-tier application, a relational database management system (RDBMS), etc.), program data 914, and operating system 916. By way of example, and not limitation, operating system 916 may include various versions of Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and / or Linux operating systems, various commercially available UNIX or UNIX-like operating systems (including, but not limited to, various GNU / Linux operating systems, Google Chrome OS, etc.), and / or mobile operating systems such as iOS, Windows Phone, Android OS, BlackBerry OS, Palm OS operating systems, etc.

[0177] The computer readable storage medium 922 may store programming and data structures that provide some example functionality. The computer readable medium 922 may provide storage of computer readable instructions, data structures, program modules, and other data for the computer system 900. Software (programs, code modules, instructions) that provide the above-mentioned functionality when executed by the processing subsystem 904 may be stored in the storage subsystem 918. As an example, the computer readable storage medium 922 may include non-volatile memory such as a hard disk drive, a magnetic disk drive, an optical disk drive such as a CD ROM, a DVD, a Blu-ray disk, or other optical media. The computer readable storage medium 922 may include, but is not limited to, a Zip drive, a flash memory card, a Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drive, a Secure Digital (SD) card, a DVD disk, a digital video tape, and the like. The computer readable storage medium 922 may also include solid-state drives (SSDs) based on non-volatile memory such as flash memory-based SSDs, enterprise flash drives, SSDs based on volatile memory such as solid state RAM, dynamic RAM, static RAM, DRAM-based SSDs, magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) SSDs, and hybrid SSDs that use a combination of DRAM-based SSDs and flash memory-based SSDs.

[0178] In certain examples, storage subsystem 918 may also include a computer-readable storage medium reader 920 that may be further connected to a computer-readable storage medium 922. Reader 920 may be configured to receive and read data from a memory device such as a disk, a flash drive, or the like.

[0179] In certain examples, computer system 900 may support virtualization techniques, including but not limited to virtualization of processing and memory resources. For example, computer system 900 may provide support for running one or more virtual machines. In certain examples, computer system 900 may execute a program, such as a hypervisor, that facilitates configuration and management of virtual machines. Each virtual machine may have allocated memory, computational (e.g., processors, cores), I / O and networking resources. Each virtual machine generally operates independently from other virtual machines. A virtual machine generally runs its own operating system, which may be the same or different than the operating systems executed by other virtual machines executed by computer system 900. Thus, in some cases, multiple operating systems may be executed simultaneously by computer system 900.

[0180] The communication subsystem 924 provides an interface to other computer systems and networks. The communication subsystem 924 serves as an interface for sending and receiving data between other systems and the computer system 900. For example, the communication subsystem 924 may enable the computer system 900 to establish a communication channel with one or more client devices over the Internet for sending and receiving information to and from the client device. For example, when the computer system 900 is used to implement the bot system 120 shown in FIG. 1, the communication subsystem may be used to communicate with a chatbot system selected for the application.

[0181] The communications subsystem 924 may support both wired and / or wireless communications protocols. In certain examples, the communications subsystem 924 may include a radio frequency (RF) transceiver component for accessing wireless voice and / or data networks (e.g., using cellular telephone technology, advanced data network technologies such as 3G, 4G, or EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution), WiFi (IEEE 802.XX family of standards), or other mobile communications technologies, or any combination thereof), a global positioning system (GPS) receiver component, and / or other components. In some examples, the communications subsystem 924 may provide a wired network connection (e.g., Ethernet) in addition to or instead of a wireless interface.

[0182] The communications subsystem 924 can send and receive data in a variety of formats. In some examples, in addition to other formats, the communications subsystem 924 may receive incoming communications in the form of structured and / or unstructured data feeds 926, event streams 928, event updates 930, etc. For example, the communications subsystem 924 may be configured to receive (or send) data feeds 926 in real time from users of social media networks and / or other communications services, such as web feeds, such as Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, Rich Site Summary (RSS) feeds, and / or real-time updates from one or more third party sources.

[0183] In particular examples, the communications subsystem 924 may be configured to receive data in the form of a continuous data stream, which may include an event stream 928 of real-time events and / or event updates 930, which may be continuous or infinite in nature without a clear end. Examples of applications that generate continuous data may include, for example, sensor data applications, financial stock ticker boards, network performance measurement tools (e.g., network monitoring and traffic management applications), clickstream analysis tools, automobile traffic monitoring, and the like.

[0184] The communications subsystem 924 may also be configured to communicate data from the computer system 900 to other computer systems or networks. This data may be communicated in a variety of different formats, such as structured and / or unstructured data feeds 926, event streams 928, event updates 930, etc., to one or more databases, which may be in communication with one or more streaming data source computers coupled to the computer system 900.

[0185] The computer system 900 can be of various types, including a handheld portable device (e.g., an iPhone® mobile phone, an iPad® computing tablet, a PDA), a wearable device (e.g., a Google Glass® head-mounted display), a personal computer, a workstation, a mainframe, a kiosk, a server rack, or other data processing system. Because the nature of computers and networks is constantly changing, the description of the computer system 900 shown in FIG. 9 is intended as an example only. Many other configurations are possible having more or fewer components than the system shown in FIG. 9. It should be understood that there are other aspects and / or methods for implementing the various examples based on the disclosure and teachings herein.

[0186] While specific examples have been described, various modifications, variations, alternative configurations, and equivalents are possible. The examples are not limited to operation in any particular data processing environment, but may freely operate in multiple data processing environments. Moreover, while specific examples have been described using a particular sequence of transactions and steps, it should be apparent to one skilled in the art that this is not intended to be limiting. Although some flow charts describe operations as sequential processes, many of these operations may be performed in parallel or simultaneously. Also, the order of operations may be rearranged. A process may have additional steps not included in the drawings. Various features and aspects of the above examples may be used individually or together.

[0187] Additionally, while particular examples have been described using particular combinations of hardware and software, it should be recognized that other combinations of hardware and software are possible. Particular examples may be implemented exclusively in hardware, exclusively in software, or using a combination thereof. The various processes described herein may be implemented on the same processor in any combination, or on different processors in any combination.

[0188] Although a device, system, component, or module is described as being configured to perform certain operations or functions, such configuration may be achieved, for example, by designing an electronic circuit to perform the operations, by programming a programmable electronic circuit (such as a microprocessor) to perform the operations, such as executing computer instructions or code, or a processor or core programmed to execute code or instructions stored in a non-transitory memory medium, or any combination thereof. Processes may communicate using a variety of techniques, including but not limited to conventional techniques for inter-process communication, and different process pairs may use different techniques, and the same process pair may use different techniques at different times.

[0189] Specific details are provided in this disclosure to allow the examples to be fully understood. However, the examples can be practiced without these specific details. For example, well-known circuits, processes, algorithms, structures and techniques are shown without unnecessary detail to avoid obscuring the examples. This description provides only illustrative examples and is not intended to limit the scope, applicability or configuration of other examples. Rather, the above description of the examples will provide those skilled in the art with an enabling description for implementing various examples. Various changes may be made in the function and arrangement of elements.

[0190] Accordingly, the specification and drawings are to be regarded in an illustrative rather than a restrictive sense. It will be apparent, however, that additions, subtractions, deletions and other modifications and alterations may be made without departing from the broader spirit and scope of the appended claims. Thus, although specific examples have been described, they are not intended to be limiting. Various modifications and equivalents are within the scope of the following claims.

[0191] In the above specification, aspects of the disclosure are described with reference to specific examples thereof, but those skilled in the art will recognize that the disclosure is not limited thereto. Various features and aspects of the above disclosure may be used individually or together. Moreover, the examples may be utilized in many environments and applications beyond those described herein without departing from the broader spirit and scope of the specification. The specification and drawings are therefore to be regarded as illustrative rather than restrictive.

[0192] In the above description, the methods have been described in a particular order for purposes of illustration. It should be understood that in the alternative, the methods may be performed in an order different from that described. It should also be understood that the above methods may be performed by hardware components or embodied in a sequence of machine-executable instructions that can be used to cause a machine, such as a general-purpose or special-purpose processor or logic circuitry programmed with the instructions, to perform the above methods. These machine-executable instructions may be stored on one or more machine-readable media, such as a CD-ROM or other type of optical disk, a floppy diskette, a ROM, a RAM, an EPROM, an EEPROM, a magnetic or optical card, a flash memory, or any other type of machine-readable medium suitable for storing electronic instructions. Alternatively, the methods may be performed by a combination of hardware and software.

[0193] Where a component is described as being configured to perform a particular operation, such configuration may be achieved, for example, by designing electronic circuitry or other hardware to perform the operation, by programming a programmable electronic circuitry (e.g., a microprocessor or other suitable electronic circuitry) to perform the operation, or by any combination thereof.

[0194] Although illustrative examples of the present application have been described in detail herein, it is to be understood that the inventive concepts may be embodied and utilized in various ways, and the appended claims are intended to be construed to include such modifications except insofar as limited by the prior art.

Claims

1. 1. A method comprising: one or more data processors receiving an utterance and a target domain of the chatbot; the one or more data processors generating sentence embeddings for the utterance; and the one or more data processors obtaining an embedding representation for each cluster of a plurality of clusters of in-domain utterances associated with the target domain, the embedding representation for each cluster being an average of sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance in the cluster, the method further comprising: The one or more data processors input the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedding representations for each cluster into a metric learning model, the metric learning model having trained model parameters configured to provide a first probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain or not, the method further comprising: the one or more data processors using the distance learning model to determine similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster; the one or more data processors using the distance learning model to predict the first probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain based on the determined similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster; and the one or more data processors inputting the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedding representations for each cluster into an outlier detection model, the outlier detection model being built with a distance or density algorithm for outlier detection, the method further comprising: the one or more data processors using the outlier detection model to determine distance or density deviation between the sentence embedding for the utterance and embedding representations for adjacent clusters; predicting, by the one or more data processors, a second probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain based on the determined distance or density deviation using the outlier detection model; the one or more data processors evaluating the first probability and the second probability to arrive at a final probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain; and the one or more data processors classifying the utterance as being in-domain or out-of-domain for the chatbot based on the final probability.

2. The step of obtaining the embedding representation for each cluster comprises: obtaining the in-domain utterance based on the target domain; generating sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance; and inputting the sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance into an unsupervised clustering model, the unsupervised clustering model being configured to interpret the in-domain utterance to identify the plurality of clusters in a feature space of the in-domain utterances, and obtaining the embedding representations for each cluster further comprises: using the unsupervised clustering model to classify the sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance into one of the plurality of clusters based on similarities and differences between features of the sentence embeddings and features of sentence embeddings in each cluster; calculating a centroid for each cluster of said plurality of clusters; and outputting the embedded representation and the centroid for each cluster of the plurality of clusters.

3. The one or more data processors calculate a z-score for the utterance based on the distance or density deviation between the sentence embedding for the utterance and the embedding representations for the adjacent clusters; and wherein the one or more data processors determine the second probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain by applying a sigmoid function to the z-scores.

4. 4. The method of claim 1, wherein the sentence embedding for the utterance is generated using an embedding model that maps natural language elements, including sentences, words and n-grams, to sequences of numbers, each of the natural language elements being represented as a single point in a vector space.

5. determining the similarity or difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster comprises: (i) calculating an absolute difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster; and (ii) inputting the absolute difference, the sentence embedding for the utterance, and the embedded representation for each cluster into a wide-and-deep learning network, the wide-and-deep learning network comprising a linear model and a deep neural network; determining the similarity or difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster further comprises: (iii) using the linear model and the absolute difference to predict a wide-based probability of whether the utterance belongs to the target domain or not; and (iv) using the deep neural network, the sentence embedding for the utterance, and the embedded representation for each cluster to determine the similarity or difference between the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedded representation for each cluster.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein predicting the first probability comprises using a final layer of the wide-and-deep learning network to evaluate the similarities or differences between a wide probability and the sentence embedding for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster.

6. the linear model comprises a plurality of model parameters trained using a set of training data; the set of training data includes absolute differences between sentence embeddings for utterances and each embedding representation for each cluster for in-domain utterances from a plurality of domains; During training of the linear model with the set of training data, a hypothesis function is used to learn a linear relationship between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster; The method of claim 5 , wherein during training of the linear relationship, the model parameters are trained to minimize a loss function.

7. the wide and deep learning network comprises a plurality of model parameters trained using a set of training data; the set of training data includes sentence embeddings for in-domain utterances from a plurality of domains; 6. The method of claim 5, wherein during training of the wide-and-deep learning network with the set of training data, high-dimensional features of the sentence embeddings for the in-domain utterances are converted into low-dimensional vectors, which are then concatenated with features from the in-domain utterances and fed into a hidden layer of the deep neural network, and values ​​of the low-dimensional vectors are randomly initialized and trained to minimize a loss function together with the plurality of model parameters.

8. A computer program for causing one or more data processors to carry out the method of any one of claims 1 to 7.

9. 1. A system comprising: one or more data processors; and a computer-readable storage medium comprising instructions that, when executed on the one or more data processors, cause the one or more data processors to perform actions, the actions including: receiving an utterance and a target domain for the chatbot; generating sentence embeddings for the utterance; and and obtaining an embedding representation for each cluster of a plurality of clusters of in-domain utterances associated with the target domain, the embedding representation for each cluster being an average of sentence embeddings for each in-domain utterance in the cluster, the actions further comprising: inputting the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedding representations for each cluster into a metric learning model, the metric learning model having trained model parameters configured to provide a first probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain, the actions further comprising: determining similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster using the metric learning model; predicting the first probability of whether the utterance belongs to the target domain based on the determined similarities or differences between the sentence embeddings for the utterance and each embedding representation for each cluster using the metric learning model; and inputting the sentence embeddings for the utterance and the embedding representations for each cluster into an outlier detection model, the outlier detection model being built with a distance or density algorithm for outlier detection, the actions further comprising: determining a distance or density deviation between the sentence embedding for the utterance and embedding representations for adjacent clusters using the outlier detection model; predicting a second probability of whether the utterance belongs to the target domain based on the determined distance or density deviation using the outlier detection model; and evaluating the first probability and the second probability to arrive at a final probability as to whether the utterance belongs to the target domain; and classifying the utterance as being in-domain or out-of-domain for the chatbot based on the final probability.

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