4469 results about "Natural language" patented technology

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

The intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Here, we introduce Z-webs, including Z-factors and Z-nodes, for the understanding of relationships between objects, subjects, abstract ideas, concepts, or the like, including face, car, images, people, emotions, mood, text, natural language, voice, music, video, locations, formulas, facts, historical data, landmarks, personalities, ownership, family, friends, love, happiness, social behavior, voting behavior, and the like, to be used for many applications in our life, including on the search engine, analytics, Big Data processing, natural language processing, economy forecasting, face recognition, dealing with reliability and certainty, medical diagnosis, pattern recognition, object recognition, biometrics, security analysis, risk analysis, fraud detection, satellite image analysis, machine generated data analysis, machine learning, training samples, extracting data or patterns (from the video, images, and the like), editing video or images, and the like. Z-factors include reliability factor, confidence factor, expertise factor, bias factor, and the like, which is associated with each Z-node in the Z-web.

A mobile system is provided that includes speech-based and non-speech-based interfaces for telematics applications. The mobile system identifies and uses context, prior information, domain knowledge, and user specific profile data to achieve a natural environment for users that submit requests and/or commands in multiple domains. The invention creates, stores and uses extensive personal profile information for each user, thereby improving the reliability of determining the context and presenting the expected results for a particular question or command. The invention may organize domain specific behavior and information into agents, that are distributable or updateable over a wide area network.

An ontology-based parser incorporates both a system and method for converting natural-language text into predicate-argument format that can be easily used by a variety of applications, including search engines, summarization applications, categorization applications, and word processors. The ontology-based parser contains functional components for receiving documents in a plurality of formats, tokenizing them into instances of concepts from an ontology, and assembling the resulting concepts into predicates. The ontological parser has two major functional elements, a sentence lexer and a parser. The sentence lexer takes a sentence and converts it into a sequence of ontological entities that are tagged with part-of-speech information. The parser converts the sequence of ontological entities into predicate structures using a two-stage process that analyzes the grammatical structure of the sentence, and then applies rules to it that bind arguments into predicates.

A system for conversant interaction includes a recognizer for receiving and processing input information and outputting a recognized representation of the input information. A dialog manager is coupled to the recognizer for receiving the recognized representation of the input information, the dialog manager having task-oriented forms for associating user input information therewith, the dialog manager being capable of selecting an applicable form from the task-oriented forms responsive to the input information by scoring the forms relative to each other. A synthesizer is employed for converting a response generated by the dialog manager to output the response. A program storage device and method are also provided.

A parser-translator technology allows a user to specify complex test and/or transformation statements in a high-level user language, to ensure that such test and/or transformation statements are well-formed in accordance with a grammar defining legal statements in the user language, and to translate statements defined by the user into logically and syntactically correct directives for performing the desired data transformations or operations. Using the parser-translator technology, a user can focus on the semantics of the desired operations and need not be concerned with the proper syntax of a language for a particular system. Instead, grammars (i.e., data) define the behavior of a parser-translator implementation by encoding the universe of statements (e.g., legal test and/or transformation statements) and by encoding translations appropriate to a particular data processing application (e.g., a data conversion program, etc.). Some parser-translator implementations described herein interface dynamically with other systems and/or repositories to query for information about objects, systems and states represented therein, and/or their respective interfaces. Some grammars described herein encode sensitivity to an external context. In this way, context-sensitive prompting and validation of correct specification of statements is provided. A combination of parser technology and dynamic querying of external system state allows users to build complex statements (e.g., using natural languages within a user interface environment) and to translate those complex statements into statements or directives appropriate to a particular data processing application.

The system and method described herein may provide a natural language content dedication service in a voice services environment. In particular, providing the natural language content dedication service may generally include detecting multi-modal device interactions that include requests to dedicate content, identifying the content requested for dedication from natural language utterances included in the multi-modal device interactions, processing transactions for the content requested for dedication, processing natural language to customize the content for recipients of the dedications, and delivering the customized content to the recipients of the dedications.

A human-computer interface system and methods for providing intelligent, adaptive, multimodal interaction with users while accomplishing tasks on their behalf in some particular domain or combination of domains. Specifically, this system accepts user input via natural language text, mouse actions, human speech, whistles, gestures, pedal movements, facial or postural changes, and conveys results via natural language text, automatically-generated speech, and displays of graphs, tables, animation, video, and mechanical and chemical effectors that convey heat, tactile sensation, taste and smell.

A system and method are provided for receiving speech and/or non-speech communications of natural language questions and/or commands and executing the questions and/or commands. The invention provides a conversational human-machine interface that includes a conversational speech analyzer, a general cognitive model, an environmental model, and a personalized cognitive model to determine context, domain knowledge, and invoke prior information to interpret a spoken utterance or a received non-spoken message. The system and method creates, stores and uses extensive personal profile information for each user, thereby improving the reliability of determining the context of the speech or non-speech communication and presenting the expected results for a particular question or command.

A voice-enabled help desk service is disclosed. The service comprises an automatic speech recognition module for recognizing speech from a user, a spoken language understanding module for understanding the output from the automatic speech recognition module, a dialog management module for generating a response to speech from the user, a natural voices text-to-speech synthesis module for synthesizing speech to generate the response to the user, and a frequently asked questions module. The frequently asked questions module handles frequently asked questions from the user by changing voices and providing predetermined prompts to answer the frequently asked question.

A system and method for hybrid processing in a natural language voice services environment that includes a plurality of multi-modal devices may be provided. In particular, the hybrid processing may generally include the plurality of multi-modal devices cooperatively interpreting and processing one or more natural language utterances included in one or more multi-modal requests. For example, a virtual router may receive various messages that include encoded audio corresponding to a natural language utterance contained in a multi-modal interaction provided to one or more of the devices. The virtual router may then analyze the encoded audio to select a cleanest sample of the natural language utterance and communicate with one or more other devices in the environment to determine an intent of the multi-modal interaction. The virtual router may then coordinate resolving the multi-modal interaction based on the intent of the multi-modal interaction.

An Internet-based server with speech support for enhanced interactivity is disclosed. This server hosts a server-side speech recognition engine and additional linguistic and database functions that cooperate to provide enhanced interactivity for clients so that their browsing experience is more satisfying, efficient and productive. This human-like interactivity which allows the user to ask queries about topics that range from customer delivery, product descriptions, payment details, is facilitated by the allowing the user to articulate the his or her questions directly in his or her natural language. The answer typically provided in real-time, can also be interfaced and integrated with existing telephone, e-mail and other mixed media services to provide a single point of interactivity for the user when browsing at a web-site.

An intelligent home automation system answers questions of a user speaking “natural language” located in a home. The system is connected to, and may carry out the user's commands to control, any circuit, object, or system in the home. The system can answer questions by accessing the Internet. Using a transducer that “hears” human pulses, the system may be able to identify, announce and keep track of anyone entering or staying in the home or participating in a conversation, including announcing their identity in advance. The system may interrupt a conversation to implement specific commands and resume the conversation after implementation. The system may have extensible memory structures for term, phrase, relation and knowledge, question answering routines and a parser analyzer that uses transformational grammar and a modified three hypothesis analysis. The parser analyzer can be dormant unless spoken to. The system has emergency modes for prioritization of commands.

The interactive delivery of voice serve messages communicating financial, personal or other news telecasts can be accessed at a subscriber's convenience on an inbound telephone, network enabled or other call. A voice service bureau may generate voice messages for individual subscribers according to their natural language queries. For instance, a subscriber may inquire “What was the closing Dow today” and the system converts the request to digital form, discriminates search terms, interrogates a database and annunciates to the call “The closing Dow was 11,000 today”. Responses to those or other inquiries may be delivered in real time or substantially real time.

A system and method for a highly interactive style of speech-to-speech translation is provided. The interactive procedures enable a user to recognize, and if necessary correct, errors in both speech recognition and translation, thus providing robust translation output than would otherwise be possible. The interactive techniques for monitoring and correcting word ambiguity errors during automatic translation, search, or other natural language processing tasks depend upon the correlation of Meaning Cues and their alignment with, or mapping into, the word senses of third party lexical resources, such as those of a machine translation or search lexicon. This correlation and mapping can be carried out through the creation and use of a database of Meaning Cues, i.e., SELECT. Embodiments described above permit the intelligent building and application of this database, which can be viewed as an interlingua, or language-neutral set of meaning symbols, applicable for many purposes. Innovative techniques for interactive correction of server-based speech recognition are also described.

A system and method for processing speech input comprising a speech recognizer and a logical command processor which facilitates additional processing of speech input beyond the speech recognizer level. A speech recognizer receives input from a user, and when a command is identified in the speech input, if the command meets conditions that require additional processing, a representation of the speech input s stored for subsequent processing. A logical command processor performs additional processing of command input by analyzing the command and its elements, determining which elements are required for successful processing the command and which elements are present and lacking. The user is prompted to supply missing information, and subsequent user input is added to the command structure until the command input is aborted or the command structure reaches sufficient completeness to enable execution of the command. Thereby, speech input of complex commands in natural language in a system running a plurality of applications and processes is made possible.

A method for processing a natural language input provided by a user includes: providing a natural language query input to the user; performing, based on the input, a search of one or more language-based databases; providing, through a user interface, a result of the search to the user; identifying, for the one or more language-based databases, a finite number of database objects; and determining a plurality of combinations of the finite number of database objects. The one or more language-based databases include at least one metadata database including at least one of a group of information types including case information, keywords, information models, and database values.

There is provided a system for supporting interactive operations for inputting user commands to a household electric apparatus such as a television set/monitor and information apparatuses. According to the system for supporting interactive operations applying an animated character called a personified assistant interacting with a user based on speech synthesis and animation, realizing a user-friendly user interface and simultaneously making it possible to meet a demand for complex commands or providing an entry for services. Further, since the system is provided with a command system producing an effect close to human natural language, the user can easily operate the apparatus with a feeling close to ordinary human conversation.

An enhanced natural language information retrieval technique tokenizes an incoming query, comparing the tokenized representation against a collection of query templates. Query templates include a first portion having one or more query patterns representative of a query and in a form suitable for matching the tokenized representation of an incoming query. Query templates also include one or more information retrieval commands that are designed to return information relevant to those query patterns in its first portion. The enhanced natural language information retrieval technique selects those query templates that are determined to be most relevant to the incoming query (via its tokenized representation) and initiates one or more information retrieval commands associated with the selected query templates.

The invention relates to a system and method for processing natural language text utilizing disambiguation components to identify a disambiguated sense for the text. For the method, it comprises applying a selection of the components to the text to identify a local disambiguated sense for the text. Each component provides a local disambiguated sense of the text with a confidence score and a probability score. The disambiguated sense is determined utilizing a selection of local disambiguated senses. The invention also relates to a system and method for generating sense-tagged text. For the method, it comprises steps of: disambiguating a quantity of documents utilizing a disambiguation component; generating a confidence score and a probability score for a sense identified for a word provided by the component; if the confidence score for the sense for the word is below a set threshold, the sense is ignored; and if the confidence score for the sense for the word is above the set threshold, the sense is added to the sense-tagged text.

A real-time system incorporating speech recognition and linguistic processing for recognizing a spoken query by a user and distributed between client and server, is disclosed. The system accepts user's queries in the form of speech at the client where minimal processing extracts a sufficient number of acoustic speech vectors representing the utterance. These vectors are sent via a communications channel to the server where additional acoustic vectors are derived. Using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), and appropriate grammars and dictionaries conditioned by the selections made by the user, the speech representing the user's query is fully decoded into text (or some other suitable form) at the server. This text corresponding to the user's query is then simultaneously sent to a natural language engine and a database processor where optimized SQL statements are constructed for a full-text search from a database for a recordset of several stored questions that best matches the user's query. Further processing in the natural language engine narrows the search to a single stored question. The answer corresponding to this single stored question is next retrieved from the file path and sent to the client in compressed form. At the client, the answer to the user's query is articulated to the user using a text-to-speech engine in his or her native natural language. The system requires no training and can operate in several natural languages.

In one aspect, the invention provides apparatuses and methods for determining the sentiment expressed in answers to survey questions. Advantageously, the sentiment may be automatically determined using natural language processing. In another aspect, the invention provides apparatuses and methods for analyzing the sentiment of survey respondents and presenting the information as actionable data.

This invention relates to a system and method for creation and automatic deployment of personalized, dynamic and interactive voice services, including information derived from on-line analytical processing (OLAP) systems and other data repositories. More specifically, the invention relates to a system and method that enable personalized delivery of information in real-time, via natural language voice communication with a voice-enabled terminal device. The system and method combines personalized information broadcast technology with an active voice page. An active voice page is created by the system, stored in a call database and used to generate dynamic voice menus. A call server retrieves the AVP from the call database and delivers the content of the service by dialing a subscriber's telephone number, speaking message text to the subscriber and recording the subscriber's input in response to the call menus. A unique AVP is generated for each subscriber scheduled to receive voice service content.

A computer system performs financial analysis on one or more financial entities, which may be corporations, securities, etc., based on the sentiment expressed about the one or more financial entities within raw textual data stored in one or more electronic data sources containing information or text related to one or more financial entities. The computer system includes a content mining search agent that identifies one or more words or phrases within raw textual data in the data sources using natural language processing to identify relevant raw textual data related to the one or more financial entities, a sentiment analyzer that analyzes the relevant raw textual data to determine the nature or the strength of the sentiment expressed about the one or more financial entities within the relevant raw textual data and that assigns a value to the nature or strength of the sentiment expressed about the one or more financial entities within the relevant raw textual data, and a user interface program that controls the content mining search agent and the sentiment analyzer and that displays, to a user, the values of the nature or strength of the sentiment expressed about the one or more financial entities within the data sources. This computer system enables a user to make better decisions regarding whether or not to purchase or invest in the one or more financial entities.

Systems and methods are provided for receiving speech and non-speech communications of natural language questions and/or commands, transcribing the speech and non-speech communications to textual messages, and executing the questions and/or commands. The invention applies context, prior information, domain knowledge, and user specific profile data to achieve a natural enviromnent for one or more users presenting questions or commands across multiple domains. The systems and methods creates, stores and uses extensive personal profile information for each user, thereby improving the reliability of determining the context of the speech and non-speech communications and presenting the expected results for a particular question or command.

A system for automatically creating and maintaining a database of information utilizing user opinions about subjects, particularly exceptional experiences. Described is an Internet system assisting/motivating a population of users interested in information about certain categories of subjects to automatically maintain the database content and to improve the usefulness and quality of the database information without any substantial management by the website owner-manager. The user opinions are primarily in the form of both comments and ratings about which natural-language terms best describe a particular subject, enabling user searches of the subject database to be by way of preferred such descriptive natural-language terms, which terms are further preferred to be evaluative and approving.

A system and method for searching information from a database using a natural language. In one embodiment, the system analyzes a natural language search request and converts the search request into one or more search words. The search words are further converted into a string of bytes, and a subset of a target database, referred to as the datasoup, is searched. If there is a match between the bytes and raw data in the datasoup, the searched data is retrieved from the target database. The searched data is then formatted and provided to a user. Optionally, the searched data can be provided to the user unformatted. In another embodiment, the system includes a system server configured to receive a natural language search request, a core engine coupled to the system server and to the target database, and a system database coupled to the core engine, where the core engine accesses the system database to analyze the search request. The system database stores global rules, one or more preference files, and one or more dictionaries, and the preference file stores information about the user.

A system and method are described for automatically detecting calendar events within a free-form email message. For example, a system according to one embodiment of the invention for automatically detecting calendar events within a free-form email message potentially including one or more attachments comprising: a pre-processor to detect one or more keywords within a free-form email message and/or free-form attachments, the keywords indicating whether the free-form email message or free-form attachments contain a calendar event, the pre-processor identifying the free-form email message and/or free-form attachments as potentially containing calendar data upon detecting the one or more keywords; and a natural language processor to further process text from the free-form email message and/or free-form attachments to determine whether the free-form email message and/or free-form attachments contain a calendar event, the natural language processor to parse the email message and/or attachments and evaluate the email message and/or attachments using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to determine the existence of one or more calendar events; and a calendar event generator to extract calendar data from the email message and/or attachments in response to the natural language processor detecting a calendar event, the calendar event generator to update a calendar using the extracted calendar data.

The present invention provides an interface and associated object model that exposes a comprehensive set of natural language processing features to an application developer. In one embodiment, the features include lexicon management services and proofing services.