Conversational Agent Style Adaptation via Rephrasing Engine

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Solution Overview

Problem

Conversational agents struggle to adapt their communication styles to fit different applications and environments, making it costly and time-consuming to generate responses with varying tones and personalities, limiting their suitability across diverse scenarios.

Innovation Solution

A computer-based system with a rephrasing engine trained on a corpus of texts with different styles and tones, allowing conversational agents to generate responses with a common meaning but in various tones, enabling adaptation to specific applications or environments.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Reliability

If conversational agents are customized for different applications and environments, then communication effectiveness is improved, but development cost and time increase

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvecommunication effectivenessVSAvoiddevelopment time
Core Design Contradiction:
ReliabilityVSLoss of time

Solution Approach 1:

The patent creates a universal conversational agent system that can function across multiple applications and environments by implementing style transfer technology. The agent maintains a core functional framework while allowing dynamic adaptation of communication styles through pre-trained language models, enabling one agent to serve multiple purposes without requiring separate customizations for each application.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #6Universality (Multi-functionality)

Solution Approach 2:

The system adjusts communication parameters such as tone, formality, and linguistic style by leveraging pre-trained language models. These models have been trained on diverse datasets representing different communication styles, allowing the conversational agent to modify its output parameters to match target applications without retraining the entire system, thus reducing development time while maintaining effectiveness.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #35Parameter changes

2Reliability

If conversational agents are customized for different applications and environments, then communication effectiveness is improved, but development cost increases

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvecommunication effectivenessVSAvoiddevelopment cost
Core Design Contradiction:
ReliabilityVSEase of manufacture

Solution Approach 1:

The patent applies preliminary action by using pre-trained language models that have already been trained on extensive datasets representing various communication styles. This pre-training work has been done in advance, so when deploying a conversational agent for a specific application, the system can quickly adapt by fine-tuning or adjusting parameters rather than training from scratch, significantly reducing development costs while maintaining communication effectiveness.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #10Preliminary action

Solution Approach 2:

The system uses style transfer technology that copies communication patterns from pre-trained models. Instead of creating entirely new conversational agents for different applications, the system replicates and adapts proven communication styles from the pre-trained models to suit different target applications, reducing the need for expensive custom development while preserving effectiveness.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #26Copying

3Adaptability or versatility

If multiple conversational agents with different styles are created, then adaptability is improved, but system complexity increases

Engineering Contradiction:
Improvestyle adaptabilityVSAvoidsystem complexity
Core Design Contradiction:
Adaptability or versatilityVSDevice complexity

Solution Approach 1:

The patent merges multiple communication styles into a single unified conversational agent system. By integrating pre-trained language models that encompass various styles into one architecture, the system eliminates the need for separate agents for different applications. The unified system can dynamically switch between styles based on the target application, reducing system complexity while maintaining high adaptability.

Inventive Principle:
Principle #5Merging (Combining)

Data Source

PatentUS11238100B2Adapting conversational agent communications to different stylistic models
Publication Date: 2022.02.01 INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINE CORPORATION
  • US11238100B2 patent drawing
  • US11238100B2 patent drawing
  • US11238100B2 patent drawing

AI summary

A computer system includes a processor configured to execute a conversational agent generator function. The conversational agent generator function is configured to receive a plurality of model input queries. Each model input query includes an intent and a corresponding answer to the intent. A database stores a corpus including sets of textual responses indicative of a common meaning. Each textual response in a given set of textual responses indicates a common meaning constructed in a different style indicative of a corresponding tone of communication. The processor is further configured to execute a rephrasing function configured determine the answer of one of the plurality of model input queries, and convert the answer of one of the plurality of model input queries into a plurality of different rephrased answers from the corpus stored in the database. The processor further outputs the plurality of different rephrased answers to the conversational agent generator function.